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“What I realized on the inside, being a movie producer, is that there is a business opportunity serving an underserved market where the major chains structurally really don’t have a way to get into,” Esparza says, arguing that large movie chains hire developers rather than developing land themselves. Its proprietary criteria are somewhat opaque: Maya has opened in locations with several preexisting theaters, such as Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif., in addition to communities where Maya is the only option, including in Pittsburgh and Delano, Calif. Today, the company has accelerated this process, making location decisions based on a market-study algorithm, Esparza says.
After three years of planning, construction began on the Salinas theater in 2004 in 2001 Esparza began planning a theater in Bakersfield that started construction in 2008. Esparza received a 55 percent loan for a location in Salinas, Calif., and guaranteed the 45 percent of funds that weren’t covered he developed the property - assembling the land, getting the entitlement, financing construction - himself, he says. He also argued that his theaters would mint new moviegoers, rather than steal patrons from other theaters, if he placed his cinemas in areas dominated by Latinos that didn’t have many other options. To make his case for his first theater, Esparza showed potential investors that, as the annual MPAA THEME report shows, Latinos regularly over-index among “frequent moviegoers,” given the size of their overall population.
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In 2001 he sold his Latino-focused cable TV system, Buena-vision Cable TV, planning to reinvest the funds into his first theater. And so, following the Selena tour, Esparza began envisioning a movie theater chain to restore that tradition. Within the Latino community in Boyle Heights, he remembers, going to movies together was a family ritual. The Boyle Heights native recalled that during his childhood, he could walk to three movie theaters that showed Spanish-language cinema. By the time he took a similar tour in 1997 to promote Selena, he says that even second-run houses in communities he visited had begun to close up. While visiting 20 cities with major Latino populations, he says he found that “there were no first-run movie theater facilities” for those communities. The idea for Maya Cinemas began in 1987, when Esparza was a cable TV executive and film producer who was touring the country to promote the Robert Redford movie The Milagro Beanfield War. “And in the long run, this is going to be the most important - if it isn’t already - audience for exhibition in the United States.” Maya Cinemas, by providing a platform for traditional Hollywood films as well as for Latino creators, aims to show the industry who it’s been underestimating. “Hollywood has not taken advantage of the income potential of producing films that speak to the national Latino population,” Esparza explains. Though the chain is small now - Maya has six locations - its CEO, Selena producer Moctesuma Esparza, has big plans: He wants to expand to “30 locations” and “become one of the top 10 exhibitors,” competing with chains like AMC and Regal on a national scale.īox Office: 'The Little Mermaid' Swimming to $118M-Plus Memorial Day Debut North Las Vegas is the chain’s first location outside of California, but the company says it won’t be the last. Latino-made films, Latin American blockbusters and/or other international films. Opening in locations with a high concentration of Latinos that the company believes are “underserved” by other theater companies, Maya’s theaters offer Hollywood first-run movies alongside a limited number of Spanish-language movies, U.S. It was a fittingly cross-cultural opening for Maya Cinemas, a theater chain that endeavors to demonstrate the power of the Latino demographic at the box office. Members of the Xochipilli Danza Azteca Las Vegas dance troupe, dressed in vibrant costumes and headdresses, mingled in the crowd before their own performance, and at one point, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe blessed the location. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, a large mariachi band played in white suits while cameras from local news stations rolled. When Maya Cinemas opened its North Las Vegas location in January, the movie theater put on a show before locals even filtered through its doors to see Escape Room.
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