Cineworld founder started off by testing auditorium seats
November 22, 2013 Leave a comment
November 20, 2013 6:14 pm
Cineworld founder started off by testing auditorium seats
By Robert Cookson
Steve Wiener, the New York-born cinephile who built the UK’s biggest cinema chain, started his career as an usher. Mr Wiener was studying at the University of Miami in 1970 when he took a part-time job at a cinema in Coral Gables, Florida. One of his first duties was to sit and rock in every chair in a 900-seat auditorium to check that they had been installed correctly. After graduating, he quickly worked his way up through the ranks of the US cinema industry. In 1991 he moved to the UK to become managing director of Warner Bros Europe – his first trip outside the US.It was then that he chanced upon two statistics that would inspire him to set up his own cinema business: the average person would not travel more than 20 minutes for entertainment, but 60 per cent of people in the UK lived further than that from a multiplex cinema.
In 1995, he and his wife founded Cineworld
and developed the business into a chain of 34 cinemas before it was acquired by Blackstone in 2004. In 2007 the company floated on the London Stock Exchange.
He holds about 1.3 per cent of the company’s outstanding equity, worth about £7m.
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