Julian is an award-winning architect with over 20 years’ experience in the leisure sector and is a specialist in cinema, leisure and commercial design with many acclaimed projects completed across the UK and Europe. Julian brings innovation and lessons learned from over 100 cinema schemes to his projects. Leading teams on a number of high-profile schemes including ODEON Leicester Square (London) and the new UCI Luxe Mercedes Platz (Berlin).
Date
What is the “cinema feeling” for the customer? We all know it, that anticipation as you enter the foyer. Purchasing your ticket, concessions catch your eye, then the hardest decision of all … sweet or salted popcorn? Popcorn and family in-tow you sit down right as the lights go down and the trailers begin. The size and quality of the picture, the rumble of the sound system evokes something primal. The movie begins; you feel the highs, the lows and then, when it’s over, the obligatory breakdown and rating out of ten as you walk to the exit.
Contained within this ubiquitous customer experience each operator has their own flair on the cinema experience. ODEON want their customers to “Feel Cinematic”, Cineworld want you to “feel more at Cineworld”, AMC “We Make Movies Better”. Each of these operators have their own brand, aesthetics style, commercial requirements and ethos for the cinema experience.
Understanding, drilling down on and crystallising an operator’s cinema ethos is the key first step to understanding the balance between commercial requirements and design freedom. What drives the operator, what is their desired “cinema feeling” and what drives the scheme itself? The commercial requirements for a boutique cinema operator and scheme are significantly different to a larger commercial operator with a multiplex.
Commercial pressures are alleviated and present more opportunity for innovative and beautiful design through us as designers fully understanding and keeping in focus our clients metric for success. In most cases for cinema operators this is spend per head. How much each customer that walks into a cinema spends on tickets and concessions combined. Regardless of the operator’s ethos or size there will be a spend per head figure that needs to be realised to achieve viability for the scheme.
Keeping this metric of spend per head in mind, understanding the geometry and the nettable areas of the individual site is the next key factor in understanding how far the design envelope can be pushed. Thinking in three dimensions and utilising the space to achieve the operators’ concessions requirements but also to maximise the number of seats per screen while balancing the customer experience. Usually, the spend per head and the quality of the development and design are intrinsically linked.
The retail experience has had to adapt with the changes in cinema goer behaviours and habits. The expectations of a cinema goer of today are not the same as 20, 15 or 10 years ago. Our clients have adapted their brands and offering to these changes in taste and expectation. Cinemas have changed a lot in their over 120 year history. From the co-opted theatres in cinema’s inception, opulent Art Deco Picture Palaces in the 30’s, multiplex boom in the 80’s and now the rise of boutique and luxe offerings. The key to creating a distinctive and commercially viable modern cinema is subtly responding these changes in experience expectation. Great examples can be seen in the inclusion of Oscar’s Bar in the new ODEON and UCI Luxe developments, responding to a shift in more adult and evening attendance and seizing that opportunity to appeal to a more mature audience and less family orientated view of a trip to the cinema.
Cinemas are more than just places to view the latest movies, many have a storied history. ODEON Leicester Square opened in 1937 and stands as a flagship and testament to British cinema. Yearly DCM Upfronts is hosted in ODEON Leicester Square, a showcase and celebration of upcoming film slates and research to promote cinema advertising. DCM (Digital Cinema Media) utilise the history, prestige and renovation of ODEON Leicester Square to impart gravitas and validity to their Upfronts event. Advertising represents a valuable revenue stream for operators providing stable and predictable revenue streams. Cinema operators aligning their brand and cinema aesthetics to the values and customers of their advertising partners by creating extremely distinctive and memorable environments, tempered with commercial viability can help to shift the needle in terms of our ability as architects to propose design options that depart from what could be described as “cookie cutter” or formulaic.
At its heart cinema is a shared experience. For the customer its family days out, date nights, movies with friends and making memories. For the operator conveying their brand essence into these shared experiences mirroring the anticipation and excitement of going to the movies with the concessions, amenities and décor. Our decades of experience of the technical challenges of cinema design and existing relationships with key specialist suppliers and consultants puts us in a privileged position to inject our passion for great design and beautiful architecture as much as possible into our client’s projects in the UK and Europe.
Sources
Gjestland, R. (2019) How to design a cinema auditorium: Practical guidelines for architects, cinema owners and others involved in planning and building cinemas. UNIC – International Union of Cinemas.
UNIC (2024) Innovation and the Big Screen. International Union of Cinemas (UNIC). Available at: https://www.unic-cinemas.org/fileadmin/UNIC_innovation_publication_2024.pdf (Accessed: 4 February 2026).
UNIC (2025) UNIC Annual Report 2025. International Union of Cinemas (UNIC). Available at: https://unic-cinemas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/2025/UNIC_Annual_Report_2025.pdf (Accessed: 4 February 2026).
Independent Cinema Office (n.d.) Building design. Available at: https://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/advice-support/how-to-start-a-cinema/building-design/ (Accessed: 4 February 2026).
ODEON Cinemas (n.d.) Feel Cinematic. YouTube video, [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dndC9ID5Dw (Accessed: 10 February 2026)
Cineworld Cinemas (n.d.) Turn your phone off… 📱. YouTube video, [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwZdo4tvoMM (Accessed: 19 February 2026).
Digital Cinema Media (n.d.) DCM Upfronts 2025. YouTube video, [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-16J2F8rXo (Accessed: 19 February 2026)
AMC Theatres (n.d.) We Make Movies. YouTube video, [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-16J2F8rXo (Accessed: 19 February 2026)