European Holdings Offer ICE Theaters Promotional Boost

variety.com:

Ben Croll While ICE Theaters will certainly keep a visible presence on the CineEurope trade-show floor, co-hosting daily breakfasts, participating in an afternoon panel on June 21, and of course running a stand fully stocked with visuals and promotional materials, sales exec Guillaume Thomine-Desmazures believes his most persuasive asset will be found off-site, in a Barcelona suburb 23 miles away.There can be found the OCINE Granollers cinema, ICE Theaters’ first immersive screen in Spain and the company’s off-site centerpiece at this year’s expo. “I could speak about our theaters for hours or years, but in the end you just have to experience them,” says Thomine-Desmazures, who has organized a series of private demonstrations at the suburban cinema and rented a fleet of busses to bring attendees there and back. “Everything makes a lot more sense once you sit down and see for yourself.” A still nascent format, the ICE immersive room might very well make the strongest case for its own self, only, at least until earlier this year, there weren’t all that many of them outside of France (just four by early April, though that number has since increased).

While exports move faster than ever, ICE’s 43 French screens remain a point of pride and a source of data – especially when compared against the full holdings of ICE Theaters’ parent company, CGR Cinemas.Quantitative analysis has thus become a pillar of the sales team’s pitch, which compares admissions from the exhibitor’s 700 standard screens against those from their 43 premium rooms and touts the results.Ahead of CineEurope, the team crunched the number on three most recent ICE-optimized releases, finding that “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” did more than half.