What is it about?
This article starts with the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes in 1985, the UK’s first multiplex cinema and charts the shifting the site of cinemas to new, out-of-town shopping and leisure centres. It considers the opening of four complexes: The Cannon in Salford Quays, and the AMC multiplexes in Telford in Shropshire, Sheffield and Dudley Merry Hill, in the West Midlands. This article emphasises three aspects of the multiplex’s growth: the importance of regeneration and enterprise; the multiplex’s role in stimulating associated leisure and commercial developments; and out-of-town and regional shopping developments.
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Why is it important?
This article draws on a large range of primary research, and its emphasis on the role of urban planning within the post-industrial ideology of Thatcherite economics is important to understanding the particular economic and geographical circumstances in which the multiplex rejuvenated the cinema going experience as part of wider patterns of leisure and consumption.
Perspectives
Given their importance there is relatively little academic writing on the multiplex cinema in Britain, especially from a historical perspective. Therefore, I hope that this article goes some way to filling in some historical gaps.
Stuart Hanson
De Montfort University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Entering the age of the hypermarket cinema’: The First Five Years of the Multiplex in the UK, Journal of British Cinema and Television, October 2017, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2017.0390.
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