In the 2010s, the North American film exhibition industry is undergoing a significant transformation as exhibitors introduce several new initiatives, including technologically and service-based enhancements to theatre experiences, offered in branded packages and available at a premium price. Behind the scenes, consolidation of theatre chains, diversification of exhibitor assets and other shifts in exhibitor business strategy are restructuring the industry in dramatic ways. This thesis seeks to examine these developments and the way exhibitors have framed them discursively both within the film industry and to the public. It takes the Cineplex Entertainment theatre chain as a key example in this moment of reconfiguration, examining the exhibitor’s implication in historical forces in the film industry and its investments in emerging exhibition practices in the present. Drawing from theoretical perspectives in cultural studies and scholarship on film exhibition and media industries, it examines trade publications, branding materials, press releases, and news sources to analyze the way contemporary movie theatres are being reconstituted through the formation and circulation of a new industry common sense about the cultural practice of cinemagoing. It interrogates how exhibitors imagine cinemagoing and cinemagoers and argues that, as they do so, they create cinema spaces and commodities organized around the perceived desires of the bourgeois audience.