Cinemark

Lee Roy Mitchell grew up around his family's theater business and started his own circuit in Ennis, Texas. His 2011 Texas Business Hall of Fame biography credits him with reduced-admission nights, a forerunner of Cinemark's discount Dollar Cinemas. He and his wife, Tandy Mitchell, founded Cinemark in 1984, and the company's annual report dates its first U.S. theater to that year. A 1996 filing adds that Cinemark USA, Inc. was organized in December 1987 to consolidate theaters its shareholders controlled; from that point to March 1997 the circuit grew from 337 screens to 1,583, and revenue rose from $43.3 million in 1988 to $341.7 million in 1996.

Cinemark's early strategy was to build modern multiplexes in mid-sized markets of 50,000 to 200,000 people, where it was often the sole or leading first-run exhibitor, and to run a separate chain of $1-to-$2 discount theaters. In December 1992 it opened its first megaplex, Hollywood USA, a 15-screen complex with an arcade and a pizzeria. By early 1997 it had built eight more megaplexes of over 80,000 square feet, with 75-foot screens, stadium seating and digital sound. In 1996 the City of Dallas paid the company $5 million to settle a suit over a rejected theater plan, a dispute the filing calls the Tinseltown litigation. Cinemark opened its first Latin American theater in Santiago, Chile, in 1993.

The company bought Century Theatres in October 2006, and its holding company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. On May 29, 2013, it acquired 32 theaters with 483 screens from Rave Cinemas for about $236.9 million; to satisfy the Justice Department it sold three of them to Carmike Cinemas that August. The same settlement required Alder Wood Partners, the Mitchells' holding company for the Movie Tavern chain, to sell Movie Tavern. By then it was rolling out XD, its own premium large-format auditorium, and it had 150 of them at the end of 2013. In December 2017 it launched Movie Club, an $8.99 monthly membership.

Lee Roy Mitchell served as CEO until 2006, stepped down as executive chairman in May 2022 and left the board in February 2023, when his son Kevin Mitchell, who founded ShowBiz Cinemas, took his seat. At the end of 2025 Cinemark ran 496 theaters and 5,637 screens in 42 states and 13 Latin American countries, with 301 XD auditoriums and nearly 1.5 million paid Movie Club members. That year it took in $3.1 billion in revenue from 193 million patrons. It still has its headquarters in Plano.