When you operate movie theaters, says Paul Wenger, who’s been in the business for many years, the Hollywood studios pretty much control your destiny.

“The quantity, quality and timing of film releases directly affect our ability to operate profitably,” he says. If a movie bombs, you’re stuck with it – and with empty seats.

But there’s one thing you can control, says Wenger, one thing that can help put butts in seats as theaters try to regain the audience lost in recent years to video streaming and the Covid-19 pandemic: The seats themselves.

All but a few of the many theaters in the 17 multiplexes that Wenger’s company operates in Maryland and three other states have cushy, electric-powered recliners. He believes recliners are essential to getting customers back into the habit of watching movies away from home:

Give them a seat that feels as good, if not better, than the one in their living rooms, and you might see a better box office.

After the trend toward stadium seating in the late 1990s, recliners started to become a thing. Wenger and partners in Flagship Cinemas, a company that started in 1995, were on top of it, building or renovating theaters in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Maine, and installing recliners.

In 2015, after Flagship acquired a struggling multiplex in a struggling shopping center in eastern Baltimore County, all 10 theaters got an extensive and expensive makeover. Nine of the Flagship Eastpoint theaters have recliners.

The 10th is a large, wow-inducing venue with 400 comfortable, cushy rockers on a sweeping, stadium-style slope.

Paul Wenger believes “seat envy” can give theaters an edge as they try to get people back into the habit of watching movies away from home.

You won’t see movies playing there except for special occasions. That’s because Eastpoint moviegoers do not want rockers. They want recliners.

And so the big theater with the 400 rockers has been given a separate name and outfitted for a new purpose: The FPX Events space for concerts, comedy nights, magic shows, ceremonies and church services. It seems yet to reach its potential as a venue for live entertainment.

But the main business at Eastpoint is movies – keeping customers who love recliners and, in the process, creating what Wenger calls “seat envy” to attract new ones.

“The industry is definitely coming back,” he says. “The industry was doing about $11 billion [annually] prior to the pandemic. And this year, it’s expected to get to around $9.3 billion. So the growth is trending in the right direction.”

How the 61-year-old, mild-mannered son of Ukrainian immigrants from Highlandtown went from usher at the old Patterson Theater to East Coast movie theater impresario is a good, one-thing-led-to-another story.

And what people sit in as they watch a movie plays a major role.

Free Popcorn

As a student at Patterson High School, Wenger “wanted to be a dentist in the worst way.” But that idea faded as he spent more and more time in movie theaters. He went from Patterson usher to assistant manager of the Grand Theater in Highlandtown, one of a chain owned by the Durkee family.

“I went into management at a very young age for Durkee, they were promoting me pretty quickly,” Wenger says. “I started to fall in love with theater work.”

After the Durkee theaters were sold to a one-time rival, Wenger took a job with National Cinema Supply, purveyors of les objets du cinéma – poster cases, drapery, projectors, aisle lighting and seats for the audience.

During that time, Wenger developed contacts with American Multi-Cinema, or AMC, the company that, starting in the late 1960s, pioneered complexes with multiple theaters. It grew into the largest movie theater chain in the world.

Those contacts were important years later when Wenger, endeavoring to build theaters on his own around Baltimore, needed equipment, including seats.

In the 1990s, Wenger partnered with a real estate investor who had an idea:

Build theaters in shopping centers, in large empty spaces previously occupied by retailers Jamesway and Ames. For starters, Wenger’s new partnership, called Premier Cinemas, bought the four-screen Liberty Cinema in Randallstown as a base of operations. (One day a week, they offered free popcorn to customers who brought their own bags.)

To grow and build theaters, they needed new or refurbished seats. Wenger called on his contacts at AMC.

“Those guys were willing to give me old chairs,” he says. “I figured I probably could get enough for free from AMC when they renovated [their theaters]. We could refurbish them for ourselves and kind of grow the business that way.”

So Wenger’s company rented a Baltimore warehouse and started stockpiling chairs. His father, Marion Wenger, was a manufacturing engineer, highly skilled in devising systems for factories. He built a conveyor for moving the chairs.

In time, the company had sand-blasting and painting facilities to refurbish chairs with metal components.

“We became a refurbisher of metal, and we were buying [and installing] new foam and new fabric, and the chairs looked new when we were done,” says Wenger.

“One thing led to another and people found out what we were doing,” he recalled. “And the seating business became far more successful than our whole cinema venture.”

Reconditioning Takes Off

Premier Cinemas eventually acquired 10 locations, most of them debt-ridden or in physical decline. Premier Cinemas installed newly refurbished seats from its sister company, Premier Seating, and announced grand re-openings.

Fact: The used chairs Wenger acquired from AMC were called Irwin Citations, made by a Michigan company that dominated the seat market. Irwin supplied all of AMC’s theaters.

But now officials at AMC heard about Wenger’s seat refurbishing operation and sent him some business. Soon Premier Seating was reconditioning hundreds of Irwin Citations for AMC, swapping worn ones for refurbished ones. To that point, no one in the industry had been reconditioning seats on that scale. Premier dispatched a crew of workers to install them overnight.

“We couldn’t do an entire 10-plex, but we could do one or two auditoriums per night,” Wenger says. “It was a swap system, a perfect model.”

The company grew, moving into larger spaces in industrial Baltimore. “We were reupholstering for AMC on the east coast and the west coast, we’d send our crews out there,” says Wenger. “We were doing restoration everywhere. … Premier Seating was growing by leaps and bounds, and AMC was sort of the driving force.”

So pleased was the company with Premier Seating that AMC would not buy newly designed chairs unless Wenger’s company first determined that they could be reconditioned at a reasonable price after years of use.

One day, Wenger got a call: Stan Durwood, the chief executive who built AMC from a family business into an international chain, had fallen in love with a theater chair from a French company, Quinette Gallay. Could Premier Seating “Americanize” it?

How to Americanize seats from Europe where they didn’t believe in flip-up armrests with cup holders?

“In Europe, they didn’t believe in rockers,” says Wenger. “They didn’t believe in flip-up arm rests with cup holders, which were all a criteria for AMC.”

Though Premier Seating had never built chairs, Wenger’s team and a Timonium fabricator named Charlie Beyrodt were able to come up with an Americanized version of the Quinette Gallay. They took the new chair to an AMC megaplex in Texas to be tested by moviegoers against seats from Irwin and from a Mexico-based manufacturer, Seating Concepts.

“It was a momentary test,” says Wenger. “They were taking people from the lobby and [having them] sit in this one, sit in this one, sit in this one, and say which one feels the best . . . And we win. It was overwhelming. ”

Meanwhile, the guys from Irwin and Seating Concepts were frustrated.

“They go to the top people at AMC ,” he recalled, “and say, ‘This is ridiculous. You can’t judge chairs based on two seconds, and who is this guy from Maryland? They’re a restoration company, not a manufacturer!’”

After winning a second customer survey, Wenger assumed AMC was ready to buy new chairs from Premier Seating.

But that didn’t happen.

“They said, ‘You’re gonna have to get someone else to buy it first,’” he says. “I think they were all nervous about committing an order to a company that was not a manufacturer.”

5,000-Seat Order

But one thing led to another.

Wenger and his team rented a booth at a trade show in Atlantic City, in one of the casinos that Donald Trump later drove into bankruptcy.

“We’re sitting there, and this old man walks up with his wife,” Wenger recalls. “His wife sits in the AMC chair, and I can see them talking, and I walk over. He was an old curmudgeon kind of guy. I said, ‘Can I help you?” He says, ‘My wife wants this chair. I own the theater in Rehoboth Beach, and we’re upgrading the cinema and my wife wants this chair.’”

The man was Richard Derrickson, owner of the Movies at Midway. He agreed to buy 800 chairs from Premier Seating, a shocking first-order for Wenger and his team. Though they had never manufactured chairs – “we never built 800 of anything” – except for the prototypes developed for AMC, they came through on time.

AMC followed with an order of its own: 5,000 seats for the company’s new 25-theater Empire multiplex in Manhattan. It was another shocker, the biggest job Wenger’s company ever had.

The AMC Empire opened in 2000, around the same time that movie theatres went into a slump. In the following years, people started watching more movies at home – and without first stopping at Blockbuster. Amazon Prime launched in 2005, Netflix in 2007.

Premier Seating was struggling when heavy snow collapsed the roof of the company’s sprawling building, damaging most of its inventory. Despite that setback, the company was sold.

But Wenger, unable to stay away from the business he had grown to love as a teenager in Highlandtown, went off to his next venture: He bought a movie theater in Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore.

Again, one thing led to another. Through connections in the industry, he met a man who was building a theater complex in New England. That man, Wenger and a third partner ended up operating as Flagship Cinemas.

They’ve acquired 17 theaters so far. One by one, they ripped out the old seats and replaced them with recliners, spreading “seat envy” from Maine to Maryland.