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ABC Cinemas (Associated British Cinemas) was a
cinema Cinema may refer to: Film * Film or movie, a series of still images that create the illusion of moving image ** Film industry, the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking ** Filmmaking, the process of making a film * Movie theate ...
chain in the United Kingdom. Originally a wholly owned subsidiary of
Associated British Picture Corporation Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), originally British International Pictures (BIP), was a British film production, distribution and exhibition company active from 1927 until 1970 when it was absorbed into EMI. ABPC also owned appr ...
(ABPC), it operated between the 1920s and the 1980s. The
brand name A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and ...
was reused in the 1990s until 2000.


History


Early years

ABC Cinemas was established in 1927 by solicitor John Maxwell by merging three smaller Scottish cinema circuits. It became a wholly owned cinema subsidiary of British International Pictures when it was merged with the production arm of British National Pictures Studios, which had been formed by Maxwell in 1926. During the 1930s, it grew rapidly by acquisitions and an ambitious building programme under the direction of chief architect W. R. Glen, who had been appointed in about 1929 and maintained a distinct house style. It acquired First National Pathé Limited which gave it trading connections to
First National Pictures First National Pictures was an American motion picture production and distribution company. It was founded in 1917 as First National Exhibitors' Circuit, Inc., an association of independent theatre owners in the United States, and became the count ...
in the United States. Existing cinemas which could not be re-modelled were usually operated as separate circuits. In 1937, the parent company, BIP was renamed
Associated British Picture Corporation Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), originally British International Pictures (BIP), was a British film production, distribution and exhibition company active from 1927 until 1970 when it was absorbed into EMI. ABPC also owned appr ...
(ABPC). ABC also ran cinemas under the Ritz brand such as the Ritz Cinema,
Muswell Hill Muswell Hill is a suburban district of the London Borough of Haringey, north London. The hill, which reaches over above sea level, is situated north of Charing Cross. Neighbouring areas include Highgate, London, Highgate, Hampstead Garden ...
. After he died in 1940, his widow Catherine sold a large number of shares to
Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (WBEI), commonly known as Warner Bros. (WB), is an American filmed entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California and the main namesake subsidiary of Warner Bro ...
, who eventually became the largest shareholders and able to exercise control, though ABPC was separately quoted on the London Stock Exchange. By 1945, it operated over 400 cinemas (usually called the Savoy or Regal) and was second only to Rank's Odeon and Gaumont chains. By the close of the 1950s, ABC had started rebranding most cinemas as ABC and dropped names like Regal. UK exhibition was characterised by alignments between distributors and exhibitors. ABC had access to Warner Brothers, MGM and its own ABPC productions, whereas rival Rank had 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Walt Disney, Columbia, Universal, United Artists and its own productions. Rival ABC, Odeon and Gaumont cinemas in a town showed their own releases and barred each other from showing the same film. Television led to a sharp decline in cinema audiences after 1952, though with the coming of commercial television from 1955 ABPC had expanded into the new medium with the creation of '' ABC Television Limited'', which gained the Independent Television contracts for the North of England and Midlands at the weekend. ABC-TV lost its franchises in 1968 and was merged with
Rediffusion Rediffusion was a business that distributed radio and TV signals through wired relay networks. The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, the first ITV (TV network ...
to become
Thames Television Thames Television, commonly simplified to just Thames, was a franchise holder for a region of the British ITV television network serving London and surrounding areas from 30 July 1968 until the night of 31 December 1992. Thames Television broa ...
. As a result of the decline, many suburban ABC theatres closed. Most of those remaining began, from the late 1950s to lose their individual names and were simply branded "ABC". In 1959 Rank abandoned the separate Odeon and Gaumont release and put the best cinemas from each circuit onto a new Rank release. The remaining cinemas were given a new "national" release but this was unattractive to distributors and in 1961 Paramount switched to ABC after refusing a "national" release for the Dean Martin comedy ''All in a Night's Work''. The "national" release soon ended entirely and there were in future just ABC and Odeon release patterns. In 1967, Seven Arts, the new owners of Warner, decided to dispose of its holdings in ABPC and subsequently
EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At t ...
launched a successful take-over bid for the company. Associated British Picture Corporation was later to be renamed Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment Ltd, although the cinema chain retained its name. In 1986, this was later divested by EMI to the Australian businessman
Alan Bond Alan Bond (22 April 1938 – 5 June 2015) was an English-born Australian businessman noted for his high-profile and often corrupt business dealings. These included his central role in the WA Inc scandals of the 1980s; the biggest corporate co ...
who sold the EMI film/cinema assets a few days later to the
Cannon Group The Cannon Group, Inc. was an American group of companies, including Cannon Films, which produced films from 1967 to 1994. The extensive group also owned, amongst others, a large international cinema chain and a video film company that investe ...
for a reported £50 million profit in seven days. EMI retained ABPC's lucrative television interests. Eventually, the advent of largely American-owned multiplexes led to the end of barring and the old distributor alignments, which had in any case been rendered largely irrelevant by cinema closures often leaving only one cinema in a town, which had access to all films but usually had to give precedence to its traditional alignment (so an Odeon might have a poor "Rank" release in its biggest screen and a big "ABC" release in a small cinema and vice versa).


ABC Minors

In the 1940s, ABC set up the first major Saturday cinema club for children, "The ABC Minors". At the beginning of each Saturday morning session, the "ABC Minors Song" would be played to the tune of 'Blaze Away' by
Abe Holzmann Abraham Holzmann (19 August 1874 – 16 January 1939) was an American composer, famous for his American march music, march "Blaze Away!". Life and career Abraham Holzmann was born in New York City on 19 August 1874. His parents were Jacob Ho ...
(1874–1939), whilst the lyrics were presented on the screen with a bouncing red ball above the words to help the audience keep the place.


The challenge of the multiplex

In the late 1980s, on the verge of bankruptcy, Cannon was taken over by Italian financier
Giancarlo Parretti Giancarlo Parretti (born 23 October 1941) is an Italian financier, who has bought, sold, and operated numerous businesses. Early life Parretti was born in Orvieto, north of Rome, Italy. He worked as a waiter in London before moving to Sicily. ...
, who then changed the company's name to
Pathé Communications Pathé SAS (; styled as PATHÉ!) is a French major film production and distribution company, owning a number of cinema chains through its subsidiary Pathé Cinémas and television networks across Europe. It is the name of a network of Frenc ...
, which subsequently bought
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, commonly shortened to MGM or MGM Studios) is an American Film production, film and television production and film distribution, distribution company headquartered ...
(MGM). These Cannon cinemas, along with a group of cinemas Cannon owned in the
Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
, were used as part of a phony transaction by Parretti to a holding company purportedly owned by Italian media mogul and future Prime Minister of Italy
Silvio Berlusconi Silvio Berlusconi ( ; ; 29 September 193612 June 2023) was an Italian Media proprietor, media tycoon and politician who served as the prime minister of Italy in three governments from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 and 2008 to 2011. He was a mem ...
, ''Cinema V''; Cinema V was a shell company owned by Parretti's business partner Florio Fiorini, to make it appear that Pathé was paying off their debts to their bank, Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland, when, in reality, the bank's loans to Pathé had expanded tremendously (including the $184 billion supposedly paid by Cinema V); this was done to prevent the
Dutch central bank De Nederlandsche Bank (, , abbr. DNB) is the national central bank for the Netherlands within the Eurosystem. It was the Dutch central bank from 1814 to 1998, issuing the guilder. Since 2014, it has also been the country's national competent auth ...
from finding out about the deepening connection between CLBN, Parretti and Fiorini. In any case, even after Parretti was arrested and Credit Lyonnais seized control of MGM in 1992, the new company began opening its own
multiplexes In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource—a ...
as MGM Cinemas. The existing few Cannon multiplexes were also rebranded as MGM Cinemas. MGM continued to operate multiplex and non-multiplex cinemas, but under its two different brand identities, with the multiplexes being known as MGM Cinemas and the smaller non-multiplexes remaining as Cannon. MGM opened new multiplexes in towns and cities already served by their Cannon cinemas, and then closed the Cannon cinemas "due to the competition from the new multiplex" – examples of this happened in Northampton and Swindon. MGM Cinemas subsequently changed hands many times, first becoming
Virgin Cinemas Virgin Cinemas was founded in 1995 when Richard Branson's Virgin Group acquired MGM Cinemas, the largest cinema operator in the United Kingdom. Virgin Group bought the cinemas for £195m, and subsequently sold 90 of the chain's smallest cinema ...
. Virgin Cinemas was founded in 1995 when
Richard Branson Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is an English business magnate who co-founded the Virgin Group in 1970, and controlled 5 companies remaining of once more than 400. Branson expressed his desire to become an entrepreneu ...
's
Virgin Group Virgin Group Ltd is a British multinational venture capital conglomerate founded by Richard Branson and Nik Powell in February 1970. Virgin Group's date of incorporation is listed as 1989 by Companies House, who class it as a holding compa ...
acquired MGM Cinemas; Virgin Group bought the cinemas (numbering 116 at the time) for £195m, and subsequently sold 90 of the chain's remaining non-multiplex cinemas to
Cinven Cinven Limited is a global private equity firm founded in 1977, with offices in nine international locations in Guernsey, London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, Luxembourg, Madrid, and Hong Kong that acquires Europe and United States–bas ...
for £70m to concentrate on multiplexes. Virgin then divested itself of the cinema business to French-owned UGC in 1999. Subsequently, UGC divested its UK operations to a rival operator,
Cineworld Regal Cineworld Group (trading as Cineworld) is a British cinema operator headquartered in London, England. It is the world's second-largest cinema chain (after AMC Theatres), with 9,139 screens across 747 sites in 10 countries: Bulgaria, Czec ...
in 2004. While this was happening, the divested smaller ABC cinemas gained a stablemate under Cinven; in 2000 Cinven bought over the one-time rival chain of
Odeon Cinemas Odeon Cinemas Limited, trading as Odeon (stylised in all caps), is a cinema brand name operating in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway and Greece, which along with UCI Cinemas and Nordic Cinema Group is part of the Odeon Cinemas Group subsi ...
for £280 million from
Rank Group plc The Rank Group plc is a gambling company based in the United Kingdom. Rank was involved in the cinema and motion picture industry until 2006, and continues to use the Gongman logo originally used by the Rank Organisation's film distribution su ...
and most of the 60 remaining ABC Cinemas, which were mostly older, town centre cinemas, were rebranded as Odeon or were closed as the chain was now being run by the former Rank/Odeon executives. An exception was the venue at Westover Road, Bournemouth venue which retained the ABC brand until its closure in early 2017. The Odeon on the same road closed later that year. In 2004, the Odeon chain was sold to
Terra Firma Capital Partners Terra Firma Capital Partners Limited is a British private equity firm. Financier Guy Hands founded the firm in 2002 through the spin-off of Nomura Principal Finance Group. The firm, which traces its roots to the formation of its predecessor i ...
who had recently purchased UCI cinemas and over the next six years all the Rank people were replaced with UCI management, replicating what Odeon did to ABC in 2001/2002. On
Glasgow Glasgow is the Cities of Scotland, most populous city in Scotland, located on the banks of the River Clyde in Strathclyde, west central Scotland. It is the List of cities in the United Kingdom, third-most-populous city in the United Kingdom ...
's
Sauchiehall Street Sauchiehall Street () is one of the main shopping streets in the Glasgow city centre, city centre of Glasgow, Scotland, along with Buchanan Street and Argyle Street, Glasgow, Argyle Street. Although commonly associated with the city centre, Sau ...
the
O2 ABC Glasgow The O2 ABC was a nightclub and music venue on Sauchiehall Street, in the centre of Glasgow. The building was constructed in 1875, renovated many times in its lifetime and also largely rebuilt in the 1920s. The building was used for numerous f ...
became a music venue until its permanent closure after it was severely damaged by a fire in 2018. Furthermore, Minehead and Skegness
Butlins Butlin's is a chain of large Seaside resort, seaside resorts in the United Kingdom, incorporated as Butlins Skyline Limited. Butlin's was founded by Billy Butlin to provide affordable holidays for ordinary British families. Between 1936 and 1 ...
holiday camp A holiday camp is a type of holiday accommodation, primarily in the United Kingdom, that encourages holidaymakers to stay within the site boundary, and provides entertainment and facilities for them throughout the day. Since the 1970s, the term ...
s had an on-site ABC cinema until the camp decided to close them in 2021.


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:ABC Cinemas Former cinema chains in the United Kingdom Butlins Entertainment companies established in 1927 Entertainment companies disestablished in 2000 1927 establishments in England 2000 disestablishments in England The Cannon Group, Inc.