Houston theater accuses AMC of antitrust action
.JPG "The AMC headquarters building is near 115th Street and Nall Avenue in Leawood.")
Viva Cinema, a now closed theater in Houston, has sued Leawood-based AMC Entertainment in U.S. District Court in Texas.
The antitrust lawsuit alleges that AMC used its clout with seven major film studios to prevent Viva Cinema from getting licenses to show first-run movies. AMC’s response said studios followed “long-standing … legal practice” in the industry.
The Viva Cinema complaint says it had a business plan to serve 34 percent of the Houston population that speaks Spanish as its primary language by screening first-run Hollywood films with Spanish subtitles or dubbed in Spanish.
The suit alleges that AMC pressured studios to not release such movies to Viva Cinema by threatening not to show those films at its nearby AMC 30-screen location.
The complaint alleges that AMC was successful and Viva Cinema was forced to go out of business.
While Viva Cinemas was operating in 2013, the complaint says, the nearby AMC multiplex showed films with Spanish subtitles or dubbing. But after Viva Cinema closed, the lawsuit says, AMC cut back on Spanish offerings and “deprived the Spanish-speaking film-going public in Houston of any choice with respect to when, where, which and at what price they could see first-run Spanish language films.”
AMC responded to the lawsuit, saying, “Allocated film zones are a long-standing, well known and legal practice within the movie exhibition industry and are determined on a case by case, zone by zone basis by individual studios, without consideration of the size of the exhibition companies. Viva Cinema clearly, and we assume knowingly, entered into an allocated film zone by opening a first-run location in close proximity to an AMC.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 10:19 AM with the headline "Houston theater accuses AMC of antitrust action."