The big screen: Bob Bagby

Cinema is in Bob Bagby’s DNA. At only five years of age, he was already working for the eponymous family movie theater business, standing on a stool behind the counter and handing out boxes of popcorn.

It was through cinema that he became smitten with his college sweetheart and eventual wife Bridget, herself the scion of another successful American movie theater dynasty, Bill’s Theatres.

And it’s cinema to which Bagby owes his fortune, as CEO of America’s fifth-largest chain, B&B Theatres, with an inventory of 554 screens across 58 locations in 16 states.

“I still love going to the movies,” he confesses. “My wife and I go once or twice a week. It’s date night. Just like everyone else, I get my popcorn and my Coke and I’m in love.”

It’s this unshakeable devotion to the silver screen that has not only driven Bagby’s career, but also given him the steel to weather various storms that have passed across the cinemascape in years past. The emergence of videotapes in the 1980s was a threat that B&B Theatres countered by installing videotape stores in all of its locations – and offering cinema-grade popcorn to boot.

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, somewhat counterintuitively, saw the company expand operations to the tune of 200 screens.

“We made a lot of deals with landlords to get the theaters open at a time when nobody else was really doing that, because I believed cinema was coming back,” Bagby says resolutely.

“We’ve added a lot of theaters, but been very strategic on how we’ve done it, and we’ve made some good deals and achieved a lot of partnerships and investors.”

An adaptable company

For a heritage company currently celebrating its 100th birthday, the uninitiated may be surprised to learn that B&B Theatres has remained nimble in the face of digital jostling from streaming TV services and other competitors vying for the modern entertainment buck.

Part of this comes down to the fact that the company still cherishes traditional values – from encouraging a family-friendly working environment for its 1,400 employees, to its commitment to building child-centric multiplexes.

One of the earliest American cinema chains to embrace digital projection, and early adopters of reclining seats, B&B Theatres is now focused on its ‘cinema entertainment centers’, the first of which recently opened in Red Oak, Texas, around 32 kilometers south of Dallas.

Spread over an expansive 3,700 square meters, the site’s 12 cinema screens are just the beginning: the facility offers state-of-the art bowling alleys, pickleball and bocce ball courts, fire pits plus a bandstand flanked by a large grassed area, designed to host live music on weekends.

The bread-and-butter side of the business is equally progressive. In partnership with digital cinema solutions provider GDC Technology America, B&B Theatres has built an array of next-generation auditoriums at Red Oak.

This includes the company’s signature Grand Screen and ScreenX, a panoramic format that presents a conventional forward-facing screen alongside dual-sided, 270-degree iterations projected onto the walls of the theater. In short, customers are literally engulfed by the movie they’re watching.

“We think our cinema entertainment centers are our future going forward,” Bagby states, not shy about proclaiming the Dallas complex as the first movie theater in the world to include an outdoor component.

“We have developers flying in from across the country looking at this thing. We’ve got several opportunities that we think will present themselves in the next 12 months. We’ll have some more of these signed and we’ll be putting them in different areas of the country.”

Partnering for success

With so much expertise in the mechanics of growing an entertainment-related business, Bagby has some advice for budding CEOs.

“Look for partnerships,” he suggests. “Sometimes you can’t afford to do it all on your own, and that’s OK. But there are people out there who might partner with you. They might put up the money if you manage the deal for them.

“Or maybe you can bring together a group of people, because everyone is looking for entertainment right now. There’s a lot of big companies out there with a lot of money that need an entertainment component to whatever they’re building. If you’re looking to get into that kind of business, there’s opportunities right now to think outside the box.”

In keeping with family custom, Bagby’s three children, Bobbie, Brittanie and Brock, have been absorbed into the business in senior management positions – and like their father and his father before that, they all worked at B&B Theatres during their teens.

In particular, Bagby remembers with fondness how his offspring navigated the crisis of the pandemic.

“Instead of fighting and arguing about stuff, they just pulled together and said, ‘How can we do this?’” he recalls.

Centered on compassion

An equal source of pride is the company’s ongoing pledge to philanthropy, a move that began in earnest around a decade ago with a commitment to Variety, the children’s charity.

“I think what got me is one of my best friends had a child with Down syndrome and I saw his issues with that,” Bagby remembers.

“One of the big things they do is they buy the kids bicycles. And I get to personally present these bikes to the kids; they’re specialty bikes that they can ride and get out on the street. And that’s touched my heart in so many ways.”

Compassion is indeed at the core of Bagby’s managerial ethos, whether he’s implementing flexible working schedules for his team or reminding managers of the impact they can have on a young employee’s life. Fostering such a culture has led to a deeply loyal workforce, with some staff working up through the ranks to become members of the company’s C-suite.