You can learn a lot working at a movie theater.
How much soda the human bladder can comfortably contain. Why children don't order Coca-Cola. How people like their popcorn. (A clue: wet.) When people like to see scary movies - and when they don't. How to calm an angry customer. (Two words: free passes.)
And if you work at the Muvico Egyptian 24 at Arundel Mills Mall, which for two years running has sold more tickets than any other movie theater in the country, you will also learn a little mythology. That creature out front is Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. The building, with its detailed hieroglyphics and massive columns, evokes an ancient tomb.
A burial place is the last place you would expect people to flock on weekends. And yet the Muvico Egyptian sold 2.85 million tickets last year and is shooting for 3 million this year. That's more people than will see the Orioles play at Camden Yards all season.
Less than four years after it opened in Anne Arundel County, Muvico has become the dominant theater in Maryland. It sells more tickets, pops more popcorn and makes more money than any other. The theater's success is partly a product of location, but it has as much to do with skillful management, almost flawless film presentation and a theme-park atmosphere that transcends the gray boxy squares of most theaters.
"In a world with a lot of alternatives to going to the movies, you really have to entice the audience," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., a California-based box-office tracking firm. "What Muvico is doing - creating a theme or ambience around the whole moviegoing experience - has been a great move for them. Muvico has raised the bar."
Muvico succeeds by giving people what they want. On June 4, for instance, the new Harry Potter movie opened on seven screens there. Shrek 2 was on five screens and The Day After Tomorrow on another five, meaning that 17 of the theater's 24 screens were devoted to just three movies.
Film snobs may grumble that Muvico is squandering its wealth of screens and failing to make lesser-known, independent films available to a wide audience. But Muvico says its mission is mass not class: to premiere big Hollywood films, and to fill the seats.
"Summer is survival of the fittest," says Bill Garza, the 35-year-old managing director of Muvico. "Your movie has to do well. If it doesn't, it's off the screen pretty quick."
