Years before I became a film critic, I ruined movies for thousands of people on a weekly basis as a teenage projectionist.
At the Elgin Mills Cineplex north of Toronto in the early aughts, I had worked my way up from popcorn-slinger to usher to box-office cashier to, finally, the big time: the projection booth. The timing was both good (for me) and bad (for unionized professionals). In the late nineties, many of the country’s big theatre chains reduced their contingents of highly trained projectionists as the more automated “platter” system of projection came in to replace reel-to-reel technology.
Basically, exhibitors could significantly cut costs by giving an overenthusiastic kid a half-day primer on how to splice together reels and thread film through a projector.
Many of my shifts passed by without incident. In charge of 12 screens, I monitored the presentation (focus, framing, sound) for dozens of showings each day. But every now and then, like any teenager, I’d do something magnificently stupid.
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There was the time that I incorrectly threaded a reel of Michael Bay’s 2001 war epic Pearl Harbor, causing the film to spill onto the floor. Another incident saw a few frames of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes reboot melt when it got stuck inside the projector (perhaps this was a blessing in disguise for audiences). And during a Saturday matinee filled with families, I inadvertently played the first few minutes of Scary Movie 2 – whose Exorcist-spoofing opening features more F-bombs and gross-out gags than anyone, adult or child, should ever witness – instead of of Shrek. Oops.
The perks of the gig were fantastic. I spent hours listening to one of my barely-older-than-me managers recount urban legends (the previous projectionist reportedly kept a pet alligator in the booth), watching the same film over and over again (I’ve memorized every line of The Fast and the Furious) and scarfing down inconceivable amounts of Burger King, the only fast-food place nearby.
But whoever inside Cineplex decided that it was a good idea to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of studio property to the unskilled hands of a teenage army made a decision that cost so many audiences the pleasures of a proper, professionally presented night at the movies. It was the greatest job that a high-school movie fanatic could have, and I was terrible at it.
I was thinking about my days inside the projection booth upon recently learning that Cineplex – which eventually handed over management of my beloved Elgin Mills multiplex to Imagine Cinemas – has designed “booth-less” theatres in its newest locations. At the Junxion Erin Mills in Mississauga, the VIP Cinemas in Calgary’s university district and the Cineplex Royalmount in Montreal, there are no long, cavernous hallways filled with whirring projectors and dusty posters and neon-coloured sound-monitoring systems. Rather, each auditorium contains a ceiling-mounted projector nestled inside a hydraulic compartment called a “hush box.” That’s it.
“In the previous days of operating a theatre with a film projector, you’d require all that space behind the machine to run it, to store reels and equipment. But now in the digital age, everything is done on a workstation through software, and it can all be controlled from a manager’s office,” explains Scott Hildebrand, director of projection and sound technology operations for Cineplex. “We want to maximize the public space within our newer builds, to give our guests more space to interact with each other, more seating. As you can imagine, a hallway projection booth takes up a lot of what is now unnecessary real estate.”
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On the one hand, the redesign makes perfect economical sense. After theatres converted from 35 mm projection to digital presentation in the early 2010s, projectionists – whether of the professional adult or useless teenage variety – were no longer necessary. With the exception of special one-off 70 mm screenings in a handful of theatres (such as Cineplex’s IMAX screen in Vaughan, Ont., and its Varsity multiplex in Toronto), a barely trained cinema manager could control every element of a presentation with the click of a button. A “booth-less” theatre feels like the next logical step for cinemas looking to save resources, especially as the exhibition industry struggles to get audiences in the door in this streaming-first era.
But to someone who spent so much of his life inside the walls of a theatre, the elimination of that historical and long-romanticized space – the private sanctum of Cinema Paradiso’s Alfredo, the dangerously alluring splice-and-dice arena of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden – feels like a true curtain-drop moment. If we come to the movies for magic, then the trick feels just a little duller knowing that there’s no Houdini up there running the show.
And yet, it turns out that “booth-less” theatres have been in operation for far longer than Cineplex’s recent experiments.
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Landmark Cinemas, Canada’s second-largest theatre chain after Cineplex, operates a handful of similarly designed theatres, although instead of a hush box the company uses what is called a “dog house” – a small, soundproof room at the back of the auditorium where the projector is located in the same small space as the sound system.
“Unless you need to attend to the projector, no one goes in there and it runs completely automated,” says Tony Campbell, Landmark’s senior manager of projection and sound, who notes that the exhibitor’s European parent company, Kinepolis, has been operating booth-less locations for more than a decade back in Belgium. “It’s all driven by the real estate that’s available.”
Of course, even the most casual moviegoer could see all of this coming. If the projection booth is disappearing, it is only because the profession of projection itself has been fading into black for decades.
According to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), there were once several union chapters across Canada filled with projectionist members. Today, Toronto’s Local 58 is the profession’s only real unionized home in this country, with nine active projectionists (who work mostly with studios, production companies and festivals) and about 20 “permittees” who are employed sporadically. In the United States, it’s a similar story, with exact figures hard to come by as so many projectionist unions have been folded in with other IATSE locals.
“There’s no real projectionist any more at the big chains, just the technicians who get called in when things need to be fixed, or when there’s a special screening in 35 mm or 70 mm,” says Victor Liorentas, the projectionist of the Hyland Cinema in London, Ont., which still presents films on 35 mm, and is even adding 70 mm presentations, too.
When Christopher Nolan’s drama Oppenheimer played in 70 mm at Toronto’s Cineplex Varsity location in the summer of 2023 – one of only a handful of theatres in North America that is equipped to handle such a presentation – Liorentas was seconded to the theatre to oversee the entire run.
“I was there for nine awesome weeks, from opening to close. Because even in a big city like Toronto, they couldn’t find anyone who they could trust,” he says. “The knowledge is disappearing. When I started back in the early nineties, I apprenticed and went through all the guidebooks and learned about every type of projector, all the equipment. It’s hard to find people who can teach you today.”
For those who still want to be locked inside a projection booth, though – a real one, containing not just digital projectors but machines that handle actual film – the work can be highly rewarding.
“When you’re working with 35 mm film, it’s so much more than just threading the machine. It’s about knowing when to open the curtain, when to dim the lights – the whole presentation of a film, it’s a great responsibility and a joy,” says Brad Sime, the booth manager and head of projection at the Metro Cinema at the Garneau in Edmonton, which screens about two 35 mm prints a month.
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“It’s a strange job in that the whole goal of it is to convince a room full of people that you don’t exist. Ideally, you never want an audience to think about whoever is up there,” adds Sime, who has been at the Metro for more than two decades. “But I’m suited to the solitude, and when you look out the port windows and see the audience engaged, it gives you a whole different respect for what film is capable of doing.”
Other veterans are less nostalgic, and see the future of film resting in technological advances. Today, many theatres are converting their Xenon lamp-supported digital projectors to laser projection, which proponents say delivers not only whiter whites and truer darks but also a 65-per-cent reduction in energy consumption.
“I’ve always been a fan of film, but I don’t think it’s practical any more,” says Gordon McLeod, a tech expert for Magic Lantern Cinemas, which operates theatres across the Prairies and in Ontario. “Even when you had full-time projectionists, films were getting scratched all over the place, and they have a finite lifespan.”
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And yet whatever might happen to the projection booth, it is clear that there is a dedicated audience who wants someone skilled manning the machinery. Especially if it is for a movie from the few Hollywood directors such as Nolan and Ryan Coogler (Sinners) who still desire – and have the industry clout to demand – that their studio partners distribute real-deal prints.
Last week, Cineplex released advance opening-weekend tickets for special 70 mm Imax screenings of Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey, for which the exhibitor will likely bring in specially trained IMAX projectionists. Less than six hours after tickets went on sale for the few theatres equipped to handle the prints – cinemas in Langley, B.C., Edmonton, Calgary and the Ontario suburbs of Mississauga and Vaughan – the shows sold out. And the movie doesn’t open until July 17, 2026.
I got my ticket, though – and while I’ll surely pay most of my attention to the screen, I’ll keep one eye trained on the booth. It still feels like home, even if I should have never been there in the first place.
