We tried to bring to Belarus everything that we liked in the world.” That includes another first for the chain, and indeed for Belarus: A self-serve M&M machine at the Mooon location that had to be purchased in London, because “we have no distributors here in Belarus.”
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They “saw a lot of locations throughout the world-what they look like. “We traveled a lot,” says Tronik of how he and the rest of the Silver Screen team decided what amenities the Belarusian market would respond to. The Mooon, Silver Screen’s fourth and most recent cinema-and its first located outside of Minsk, in the city of Grodno-has a coffee shop, a self-serve snack bar, and an entertainment/gaming area for children, in addition to five auditoriums, three of which are now open-one boasting ScreenX technology, and another with tables and sofas for easier in-theater dining. Silver Screen’s second location, which opened in 2015, brought Dolby Atmos sound and recliners to Belarus for the first time its third gave the CIS region its first ScreenX screen. But we succeeded.” Despite higher ticket prices, the Galileo welcomes over 400,000 admissions a year. With $5 million invested in one location, we were called crazy. For booking in state-owned cinemas, it’s about $2. $5 million was invested in the first theater, at which pricing was set “on the level of $5 per ticket. Maybe it’s a big word-but still, we think so.”īuilding a cinema chain in a place where there aren’t any cinema chains-where there are no multiplexes, and cinemagoing isn’t a common past time-took experimentation. “We think that our business actually helped to develop culture …. “But there was willingness to develop from the nation, from the people,” says Tronik.
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Silver screen cinema movie#
Similarly, there’s little by way of a local movie scene, with most of the productions shot in Belarus originating from nearby Russia rather than local filmmakers. Five years and four Silver Screen multiplexes later, it’s still low, with the average person buying less than one ticket per year. The country’s per capita annual movie attendance rate was the lowest of any former Soviet country. “There was no culture” in Belarus, Tronik says. Government-owned cinemas, though well-placed in centrally located areas, typically aren’t of the highest-quality, Tronik explains-and with their standard of having one screen apiece, they certainly didn’t provide cinemagoers with much by way of variety, either among programming or the exhibition amenities that audiences in other countries have access to. Prior to Silver Screen’s emergence, the former Soviet country had no chains or multiplexes to speak of. Traditionally, cinemas in Belarus have either been privately owned single locations or, more frequently, theaters owned and run by the state. What is now, in 2021, four theaters-with one opened in March 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic-was then just one, but that one passed a pretty significant milestone: Silver Screen’s Galileo theater, in the capital city of Minsk, was the first multiplex in the Eastern European nation of Belarus. “We were called crazy!,” recalls CEO Oleg Tronik, reflecting on the 2014 birth of Silver Screen Cinemas.