Morelia, a partnership, a sale and a fresh start.

Cinépolis is the cinema business of the Ramírez family of Mexico. English Wikipedia says Enrique Ramírez Miguel founded Organización Ramírez in Morelia, Michoacán, in 1971, and Spanish Wikipedia says the company began that year with the opening of the Cine Morelia in the city’s historic centre, now called Cinépolis Morelia Centro, founded by Ramírez Miguel together with his son Enrique Ramírez Villalón. Spanish Wikipedia adds that the venue hosts the Morelia International Film Festival. El Universal and Tiempo, reporting in June 2019, both gave 1971 as the year the company was founded.

The family’s own account in the trade press reaches further back. In an interview published by Boxoffice on 24 April 2018, chief executive Alejandro Ramírez Magaña said his grandfather opened a cinema in Morelia in 1956 and started a formal company in partnership with the Alarcón family in 1963. He said that circuit, which ran for eight years, was independent of the state-owned operator Cotsa, and that in 1971 the government asked to buy it and the partnership’s cinemas were sold. His father and grandfather then started again from scratch, he said, opening Cinema La Raza in Mexico City in 1971. English Wikipedia also names earlier theatres in Salamanca, Acámbaro and Guanajuato under the name Cinematográfica Cadena de Oro.

The growth after 1971 came under a string of earlier names. English Wikipedia says Cinemas Gemelos was born in 1972 and that the national expansion of Multicinemas began a year later; Spanish Wikipedia places both in 1973.

A 1994 name, VIP seats and a long list of countries.

The Cinépolis name came with a change in Mexican law. Ramírez told Boxoffice that the Mexican cinema industry was deregulated in 1994, when Cotsa was privatised and the distribution market opened, the same year the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, and that this was “the period when Cinépolis was born as a brand”. Being able to work with every distributor allowed the company to build multiplexes. Spanish Wikipedia says the Cinépolis brand appeared in 1994 together with multiplex-style cinemas with a renewed image at the Plaza Carrousel shopping centre in Tijuana. English Wikipedia says the name means City of Cinema and gives the slogan as La Capital del Cine, “the capital of cinema”.

The sub-brands followed. Ramírez said the company introduced stadium seating in 1997 and luxury cinemas under the name Cinépolis VIP in 1999; Spanish Wikipedia dates the opening VIP site to 19 December 1999 at the Interlomas shopping centre in the State of Mexico, and says the loyalty programme Club Cinépolis began in 2001. Ramírez said IMAX screens arrived in the company’s multiplexes in 2004 with The Polar Express, and that 4DX seating came in 2009; English Wikipedia dates the 4DX launch, with the South Korean CJ Group, to 2 June 2011 at the Plaza Acoxpa mall in Mexico City. He also named Cinépolis Jr., a family format with a play area.

Expansion abroad began, Ramírez said, with Central and South America, followed by India, the United States and Spain, and then the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain. Spanish Wikipedia says Cinépolis opened in Guatemala on 19 December 2003. Both Wikipedias say the company began operating luxury cinemas in the United States in 2011, under the name Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas. English Wikipedia says it entered India in January 2015 by acquiring Fun Cinemas and Argentina in 2017 by acquiring Village Cines, and that it began operating in Bahrain in January 2019 and Oman in May 2019. In Indonesia, Cinemaxx multiplexes were renamed Cinépolis during 2019.

Some acquired chains kept their names. Spanish Wikipedia says the company bought Cine Hoyts in Chile in 2015, renaming those cinemas Cinépolis in 2020, and acquired Yelmo Cines in Spain the same year, where the brands Cine Yelmo, Cine Yelmo Premium and Cine Yelmo Luxury were set out in 2019. El Universal described the business in 2019 as the corporate group of the Ramírez family, led by Alejandro Ramírez.

One name across many formats and countries.

Many cinema chains do not run a single brand so much as a small family of them. A recliner hall with food brought to the seat, a large-format screen, a room built for children and a seat that moves with the action may each carry its own name, and that name has to sit on the booking page, the ticket, the auditorium door and the trailer before the film. Some chains give these formats a shared prefix or suffix, so that each one reads as part of the house; others license a technology partner’s name and place it beside their own. Either way the designer’s task is to set an order of precedence: which name leads, which follows, and how a format label looks when it appears on its own on a small screen.

Loyalty schemes and memberships add another layer. A membership card, an app account or a points programme often has a name of its own, and for regular visitors it may be the part of the brand they handle again and again, at the box office, at the counter and in their inbox. When a chain buys another circuit, it may keep a familiar local name over the door for years, rename sites one at a time, or move everything to a new name at once, and each choice changes what the signage, the membership and the app need to say. Read this way, a cinema identity is a naming system as much as a logo: a parent mark, a set of format labels, a membership name and, sometimes, a heritage name that is allowed to stay.

From a gold film-strip star to a letter C.

The logo changed in the summer of 2019. Tiempo reported on 29 June 2019 that Cinépolis had launched a new image, with a simpler logo and a radical change of colours and typography, initially on its social media accounts and later, it expected, on the façades of its cinemas. The paper said the company had shown a trailer hinting at the change from 27 June, and that the new logo centred on a single letter “C” in white on a light blue ground, alongside a new wordmark for the full name in a different typeface. The change was to appear in cinemas gradually. El Universal reported the same day that the new image belonged to a push towards digital ticket buying, with more kiosks inside its cinemas.

The mark it replaced was described a month later. El CEO reported on 24 July 2019 that followers had noticed a quiet change to the logo on social media from June, and that the logo had kept, since the brand’s origin, its golden film strips forming a star; the new one dropped the star. The magazine said the company had kept its established blue, adding saturation and brightness, and would pair it with textures for different themes, genres and campaigns, and it noted that a change of this kind runs from the graphic identity to uniforms and cinema marquees. Spanish Wikipedia describes the June 2019 logo as built on the chain’s name with a letter C split in half.

The company explained the idea later that year. Merca2.0 reported on 20 November 2019 that Cinépolis had left the film strip behind for a living logo that could mutate. Ramón Ramírez, the company’s director of public relations, told the magazine that the rebranding was needed because celluloid would sooner or later become an obsolete symbol, like the rotary telephone, and that the new logo represented a blank screen that adapts to different emotions, such as horror, romance or the Day of the Dead.

For a design guide, Cinépolis shows how a family circuit from Morelia can carry one name, “City of Cinema”, across VIP, Junior and large-format halls in many countries, and then trade a gold film-strip star for a letter C meant to work as a blank screen. Compare Cinemark, one of the foreign exhibitors Ramírez said arrived in Mexico after 1994, and CGV, the Korean group whose ScreenX format Wikipedia says Cinépolis brought to Mexico. For this guide we use capital blue, daylight sky and film-strip gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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