With another seven premium theaters set to open in India by this coming December and negotiations ongoing with new partners in Europe, Asia and Latin America, ICE Theaters will hit the ground at this year’s CinemaCon with an expanding international portfolio and a heftier global reach.
“Clearly, people know our brand,” says ICE Theaters senior VP sales and strategy Guillaume Thomine Desmazures. “When a massive group like India’s PVR Inox entrusts you to build several new cinemas over the next five years, that affords greater legitimacy. Instead of [introducing ourselves and our product] we field more financial questions. People no longer ask who we are and what we do; they want to know about price and return-on-investment. More so than last year, today, we’re really centered on business.”
While offering revenue share or fixed fee models tailored to specific markets, ICE execs have adaptability as a key element of their sales pitch. “We can adjust our model for each client,” says Thomine Desmazures. “It really depends on the market, the average price, the occupancy rate, etc. We have a lot of flexibility on this because it’s a model that allows for a return on investment within the first year.”
Looking past CinemaCon, and beyond the marketing materials and speeches shared on an expo-floor, Thomine Desmazures believes that each ICE equipped theater can be its own best advocate, and that the most convincing pitch of all is when the two rows of LED screens alight, and align with the propulsive action on screen.
With that in mind, the ICE brass will soon launch a short-film competition, inviting emerging filmmakers and animators to create one-to-two-minute shorts emphasizing the full, immersive potential of the ICE room. Winning entries will then be programed and screened in participating theaters.
“We can go much further in our immersive approach,” Thomine Desmazures explains. “We can push the panels to their full capacities in order to show the audience that they are in an ICE room, and that they’re experiencing something truly, fundamentally new. We’ll brief the creative teams that movement and color are crucial to immersion, and from there, we’ll encode and present their shorts in front of our big releases.”
Next year, ICE will introduce an extra large format auditorium able to reach greater capacities than ever before, while back at the home base in La Rochelle, the company is experimenting with other immersive exhibition technologies, checking for compatibility within the wider ICE Theater experience.
In the nearer term, the company’s technicians are hard at work formatting this summer’s blockbuster slate for ICE screens, with projects like “Elemental,” “The Flash” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” now getting the Bunker treatment.
When asked what upcoming film might repeat the success of last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” – in both luring curious audiences back to the cinemas and then doubling as a prototype and sizzle reel for the format’s full capacity – CGR Cinema’s managing director Jocelyn Bouyssy gave a effusive and eager nod to “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” though he made sure tip his cap to a number of other releases.
“At first, we had to search for films to format,” says Bouyssy. “Whereas today, we’re have to figure out what to do when [competing studios] want to hold the ICE screen for 15 days and we can only offer a week. Today, we have an abundance of riches.”