Saving the summer movie season with Cineplex’s Ellis Jacob, king of Canada’s film industry

It is the middle of the movie industry’s biggest event of the year and Dwayne Johnson wants to know the whereabouts of a 69-year-old Canadian businessman.

Until you realize that Ellis Jacob is one of the most powerful people in the Canadian movie business. Not only did he help lead the global exhibition sector through the first stages of the pandemic during his tenure as NATO chairman, but as the head of Cineplex, which operates 1,640 screens representing about 75 per cent of the Canadian market, he is basically running North America’s only true coast-to-coast exhibition giant.

As the leader of Cineplex for the past 19 years, Jacob has been variously described as an “incredibly loyal” boss who treats his employees like family ; a “fierce competitor” ; a “tough negotiator who will beat you down for a dollar” ; and “one of the cheapest guys you will ever meet, in an almost comical way that he’s proud of” . But Jacob’s long show-business career doubles as a history of the tumultuous Canadian film industry – and offers marquee-bright clues as to where it might be heading.

After finishing his MBA at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Jacob worked at Ford and Motorola in the 1980s under mentor Gerry Kishner before the duo moved to Cineplex Odeon Corp., then led by Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb. When Kishner left Cineplex for Canadian Tire, he again tried to convince Jacob to join him – and if KishnerFor the remainder of the 1990s, Jacob stayed with Cineplex Odeon until its merger with U.S.-based Loews in 1998.Jacob recalls with a laugh.

For the remainder of the 1990s, Jacob rode the roiling waves of Canada’s exhibition landscape. He stuck with Cineplex Odeon until its merger with U.S.-based Loews in 1998. He then joined Alliance Atlantis Communications as head of integration, before founding – with backing from Onex’s Gerald Schwartz and top Canadian film honchos Robert Lantos, Victor Loewy and Michael MacMillan – upstart exhibitor Galaxy Entertainment.

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