Welcome to another amazing episode of Making New Possible. My name is Angela Damiani and I am the CEO of New. I have a really fun guest today. I have the CEO of Marcus Corporation, Greg Marcus, on to talk about all things movie theaters, but actually we get into in-person experience and what it means to be a good steward as a predominant business leader and the responsibility you have then to impact the culture and the social life of a city. So, let's get into it today. Thank you so much for being on the program. Welcome, Greg.
Hey, Angela. How you doing?
I'm doing great. How are you doing? Thank you for joining Making New Possible.
Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Of course. Well, I sort of said in our preamble a little bit, obviously maybe you could start with like a broader overview of what Marcus Corporation is, but I thought I'd love to sort of drill down a little bit into your thoughts on the theater part of your business after you do that.
I am the movie guy. So, yeah. Well, you know, it's the Marcus Corporation. We actually have a number of operating businesses where we but the Marcus Corporation is the big one that everybody knows about, at least as it's constituted. It's the public company and it has two operating businesses. Movie theaters as you said and hotels. We're in full service hotels and you know it's the hotels if you're you know Milwaukee that you know it's the Pfister, it's the St. Kate, it's the Hilton, we have other we actually have 17 hotels around the country that we run and actually and the business has as the Marcus Corporation has been in many businesses through the years. When we just turned 90 we've been in at one point restaurants were the biggest part of our business. We had Big Boys and KFC's and Applebee's and all that kind of stuff. Limited service lodging which was budget hotel became Baymont. That was then became the biggest part of our business and then we sold that and then now theaters are the biggest part of the business but the hotels are not too far behind.
Then we also have a private group that my brother runs that owns a real estate business and Verlo mattresses and a bunch of restaurants that you would all know here in Milwaukee. We own and Bridgewater and the Edison and a lot of the third ward kind of stuff. Smoke Shack, Blue Bat. You know, fun local restaurants.
Well, very very diversified. But really a lot of public-facing businesses. Obviously Milwaukee is most known for its in-person experiences. So that's really where I like to spend a lot of time thinking is like how do we get people into an in real life setting? And maybe
Yeah. Well, I know. I feel like we're really kindred spirits that way. I remember you know when nobody wanted the pandemic to end, you were the one harping, you know, I mean to bring things back and I thought, 'Oh god, this is who I need to get to be my champion when we want to like try to turn the night market back on because Greg gets it.' Like we need in-person experiences.
Oh, totally do. You know, it's you know, humans were meant to, you know, in the height of the pandemic, you know, they would have me on these and more like they would be like these big meetings that weren't taking place in person and they bring people in who were dealing with the pandemic. And I sort of joke that I was the poster child for Schadenfreude, which is pleasure in the misery of others because they would have me on and they'd say, 'Well, you know, if you think your life is bad right now, talk to this guy.' It was we were pretty messed up. I mean, I see it again exist now at the end of the day. But I did say, you know, I believe in the importance and humans are meant to be together. We you know, the years and years of evolution have programmed us to be together and we're stronger in being together. You know, I always go back to this book called Bowling Alone.
This was written, you know, over 25 years ago and it was making the observation that we were spending less time together and that we were losing the bonds of social trust, which it doesn't just mean like I trust you to, you know, with something that's important. It's like more if I'm on the side of the road and I have a flat tire and someone comes to help me that I trust they're there to help me not to rob me, right? And so, you know, and countries they observed the countries that had high degrees of social trust did better on every scale, you know, social, economic, health, everything. And so they were positing that people were spending less time in houses of worship, less time at Rotary, less time at bowling leagues. That's why they called it Bowling Alone and so less time together and I think you know unfortunately a quarter of a century has only showed that that's accelerated and people get stuck in their silos and their houses and you wonder why the world seems to be so messed up right now. Well, you know, we need to be together more. We need to look for more opportunities to be together. This work from home thing. I'm sorry for people that are watching this thinking, 'I love working from home.' That's great. But you're probably sitting at home and losing your mind. So, go out and be with people.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it is an evolutionary thing, you know? You know, think about like early homo sapiens living in a cave trying to like defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger. Like, they needed to be together in order to survive. And even though our technology has allowed us to be connected in the last 40 years in ways that we never could be without having physical proximity to one another, I think we really do need that for our health, for society. I've been playing with the idea actually that we're in a credibility recession and it's sort of the long tail of the last 25 years of social media and the sort of political discord and people, you know, in the last 6 years things are open. Your theaters are back, you know, I mean, you can have people stay at your, you know, go to your restaurants and not have to have a 6ft, you know, distance or whatever. But there have been some shifts since that I think haven't come back. And I actually be curious to see what do you think of that? Like what is the thing that you most notice as a difference in this post-COVID era given all of your IRL businesses?
Yeah, old people are lazy. I mean, it's really the truth. I mean, you know, looking at just the movie demographics, the people who've come back are the what is it? the Gen Z's, the millennials, the youngest groups are back at the movies and want to be out, want to be amongst other people, which has always been the case. It's always been a business for youth. But we had a nice business of people who wanted to come see, you know, more dramas and comedies and stuff that was, you know, aimed at a little bit of an older audience. It wasn't the bulk of the business, but it was a big chunk of it. And that group can't seem to get themselves off the couch. It's really amazing the really the inertia just it's like I may as well just stay home tonight. Well that's not a really again it's a good thing occasionally but you know I say to you we were talking about technology I always say technology is very enabling until it's disabling.
Mhm. This is great. You know, historically, maybe we would have been doing this on a conference call, you know, and you wouldn't see the images and you wouldn't see me smile or see me and say, 'Oh, there's the movie guy, whatever.' You know, that's this adds a dimension to it. That's enabling. It's disabling when you're on a Zoom with the person down the hall. Or you could have gotten together and you chose, well, let's just do Zoom because it's convenient, not because you had to. I, you know, it's like at the office. This is this whole thing. I was always a big return to work person. Like, oh, you know, you just think it's better for you. Well, it is better for us, but I actually think it's better for you, the person working, because you do, you know, you get out and you meet people and you're mentored and whatever, or you're mentoring, and there's so much that goes on beyond just, you know, sitting there where you're processing the job. You know, and
Well, then and if any part of your job requires creative output, which, you know, that's basically all that we do at New is come up with new fun ideas. It's so hard to do that by yourself. I mean, I would say I was a little hesitant to return to the office post-COVID mostly because our office was so sad and gray and it dawned on me, you know what I mean, in early '23 like I feel like our output has really diminished. We need more time together and if the issue is the office, we should just move offices and so we did. We bought a building in Bay View and turned it into a clubhouse that is the best place for actually coming together and ideating and actually being able to interact with each other. And what's interesting is in the last year and a half the people who come here every day are the Gen Z employees of ours. They are the ones that want to be together. And I think it's for exactly what you're saying like they need a network. They want to actually interact with one another. They don't want to be alone. I saw a really funny headline actually last week that said that Gen Z is going to bring the mall back. For the same reason like you know they actually want to have not just like the recommendation from TikTok or Instagram but to go touch feel be you know what I mean in and around the things they could actually buy which gave me a lot of excitement to be honest with you like okay maybe this in-person experience will be more coveted in spite of the fact that the technology has sort of accelerated in and away from us.
I said, 'It's great.' Look at you know the office. If you said you know I got a problem with my let's pick today where it's going to be 100 my air conditioner. I need to wait at home for the air conditioning guy to show up and I you know but I need to do my meetings. That's technology that's very enabling. That's great. Stay home and take care of what you've got to take care of. But, you know, stay home in your pajamas all day and, you know, run over to Starbucks. That's disabling. That's not enabling. So, use the technology to be enabling. Then let's leverage it so that people can otherwise in the old days like I got to go to work. How am I going to get this done? And let's make it miserable or I want to take my kid and I want my kid to have their I want to be able to drive my kid to school so I want to take my first meeting on. So fine, that's enabling. It's disabling when you just choose not to.
Well, yeah. Yeah. And to your point, we were talking about why people even 25 years ago were opting out of those in-person experiences. I think the long-term effect is just sort of the lack of trust. And so the antidote to that is more exposure to one another. You know what I mean? Like when you have more exposure to one another, you actually make eye contact. You see someone for their whole person and not maybe the comments that are on a screen. It's so easy to sort of disembod someone when you're only seeing the text version of them.
Oh, absolutely. And well, I mean, let's I mean, I can think of a thousand things that are wrong, but I think all but first of all, I think that chemically something happens in your brain when you see someone, when you smell somebody, when your senses are activated, your brain does change. I'm certain of that. And how you perceive something. So whether it's going to a movie, watching it at home is different than just physically how your brain perceives it is different than if you watch it with other people in a theater. And you know, I think that that's really really very important and what makes going to the movies, you know, different. I always say though, and it's not just that, it's the memories and it's whether it's the memories of, oh, you know, I spent a bunch of time in high school with my buddies and we all went over to the theater all the time. That was fun. Or, you know, I always say like right now, and I'll use Toy Story 5, a great movie. I absolutely loved it. I saw it this weekend and it was so good. And you'd think, okay, Toy Story 5 really still? Yeah. Really excellently made movie. And but you know, I said, you know, 20 years from now, I'll take the number zero or below of kids who say adults at that point say, you know, I remember my first movie. My parents, they took me into the family room and we turned on the TV and we watched Toy Story 5. I mean, no one's going to say that, but there will be kids who say, 'You know what? I remember my parents took me to my first movie and we saw Toy Story 5 and my mom held my hand and my dad bought me popcorn and I thought that Woody was...' That's the memory they'll have. That's you can't ask for more as a parent. You can't ask for more as a kid. It's just different.
Mhm. Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. It's of course now with streaming content you can access whatever it is you want to access but what you're describing is how that went from you know a piece of content into an experience. Who did you go with? Was it a first date? You know what I mean? Like I feel like you remember all of the other little parts around it even maybe more than the film itself.
Oh absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. Again enabling to be able to see anything you want anytime. That's great. I mean, you know, you want to watch TV. How many times have we used to sit at home and say, 'There's nothing to watch.' Okay, you find something to watch. Great. If you're at home and it's the time to be entertained at home, that's great. But when you start using it as a crutch to not leave, which is what a lot of the older crowd is doing, I just wait and watch it at home. I can watch that movie. It's not a spectacle, which is so stupid. It's just not doesn't make any sense to say that if it's not a spectacle, I don't want to go see it in a theater, that I don't want to spend a few extra bucks. It's really more do I want to be out amongst people and that's and when you think about your cheapest form of entertainment you can say oh movies are expensive but well compared to going to a concert or compare it to going to a baseball game or a football game or whatever other thing you could possibly think of doing where you want to be around people movies actually are pretty reasonably priced.
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to know one thing you think people immediately notice, you know, before a movie starts from your iconic like kind of talking heads to loyalty, you know, I mean, your digital engagement, the things that you, you know, you are a Milwaukee icon. I'm curious, how has the pre-show marketing changed in the theater business? Maybe besides you becoming the star of the show in years past?
Well, I mean, if you got to go back all the way. First of all, yeah, that's I never intended to be the star of the show. I didn't that was not where that started. It wasn't like I was thinking one time I told the story of how I ended up on the screens and I was doing it with our theater managers who had been doing it now long enough that a lot of them have turned over and probably didn't know the story. And I, you know, for those of you who think I'm this like giant egomaniac that just wants to see myself on the movie screen, I said, you know, okay, anyone in this room, please raise your hand if you like seeing pictures of yourself. Of which, of course, no one raised their hand because seeing pictures of themselves. And I said, well, imagine seeing yourself on 50 to 70 ft of screen when you go to a movie. It's not easy to look at yourself on a movie screen. Trust me on this one. But it became something that was important and part of what we do and it gives it a local flavor and it makes it gives a connection to the business that really hard for anybody else to do because our names are on the theater as opposed to some of our other competitors where it's just a brand name. It's not necessarily a family's name.
The but you know the pre-show I mean you got to go if you go back I mean originally there was like not much to it. I mean, there was it was, you know, a word jumble, some slides that maybe played off a slide projector for local businesses, you know, the dry cleaner and a local restaurant or two. And then, you know, we'd move into the trailers at showtime. It was trailers and you'd see, you know, probably 15 minutes of trailers and then the movie started. We put up maybe a thing for, you know, get M&M's and popcorn at the concession stand to pitch the concession stand and that was about it. Over time, it actually was going on in Europe much longer. Advertisement became a much more important part of what we were doing and so helping to you know deal with the cost of running a movie theater which the economics if public companies it's we're not you know it's not the easiest business. The but so we started and then that we started with ads. Now, the ads typically ran up until showtime for us. And so that was what we call the pre-show and we have a vendor that puts those together and goes out and looks for national, but we have and so you get, you know, a lot of ads that run basically an ad show with we actually begged them to put some more content in there to get people to come and see it, but those ads run up until showtime and with a little bit of maybe some behind-the-scenes stuff or some comedy. They've actually added it over time to add a little bit of meat to that bone of advertising that runs up until showtime. And then at showtime, we moved to trailers. Now, in the recent years, we've added a few ads because those are that's very because by that time, most people start to get in their seats and it's very valuable. And so, people wanted to reach the customer. You know, we've tried to keep our pre-show from the show time to when it goes to about 15 minutes. When it gets to be busier in the summer, we can stretch out a few more minutes. And if I'm on the screen longer than I try to only have it a minute, but like I have one I know that's running, it's two minutes right now because it's actually promotion for a movie for Super Troopers. Which actually turned out sort of funny. The actual cast of Super Troopers is in the piece with me.
Over time, that has been an interesting change where we've started to do more with talent. I've done some really interesting things with some really interesting people that I never anticipated, you know, and this is all never anticipated. I can go back to the story of how I even ended up on the screen because it was never anticipated, but I did a thing with Kevin Costner for Horizon. I did a thing with the comedian's name from Parks and Rec, the Indian comedian. He was
Oh, yes. I can't think of him. Yes. But I know exactly who you're talking about.
But we I actually made him laugh, which is hard to do. You know, they don't like to break that and there's some good outtakes. It was like where we were messing around and I was making him laugh. And I've done I did the thing with Super Troopers guys. I've done a Oh, William H. Macy. I did a thing with him, which was so cool. For the old people in the audience. I did that and the one that was the most interesting and to me the most meaningful I don't know that it meant much was I was you know I was a big Rob Reiner fan. I was very into the movies I went to film school and in the late 80s early 90s Reiner made a string of movies that were just incredible that When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, Stand by Me but his first one was Spinal Tap. And when Spinal Tap 2 came out, the team said, 'Would you like to film something with the guys from Spinal Tap and Rob Reiner,' and I'm like, 'Uh, yes, please.' I went last summer about a year ago, and I filmed with them. I have like 20 minutes of me just hanging out and we were just ripping for 20 minutes, which somehow we pieced into a trailer, and it was amazing. I loved being with them and we had a lot of fun. And I traded an email with Rob Reiner afterwards and I thought, well, maybe I'll see this guy again. And then he passed away.
