EasyCinema comes to City

EASYJET multi-millionaire Stelios Haji-Ioannou is planning to bring his struggling cinemas venture to the capital to prove his revolutionary ticket-pricing business model can work in this sphere.

With his pilot easyCinema project in Milton Keynes failing to take off - its billing of ?second run‘ films are showing to 80% empty movie theatres at its multiplex in the new town - Haji-Ioannou believes his only chance of attracting blockbuster films immediately from release is to open in London.

He is apparently instructing land agents to find sites within the M25 on which to open easyCinema multiplexes, a move that he hopes will break the impasse with the big film companies.

Six months after easyCinema opened for business, the movie giants are still refusing to grant him new releases.

That is apart from Down with Love, a less-than-successful romantic comedy produced by 20th Century Fox, starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger.

A spokesman for Haji-Ioannou's privately-held easyGroup said: ?The consumer side [in Milton Keynes] has been going well, proving that our yield management system of book early-save money is working.

?It‘s the industry side that's not good, with the distributors not giving us first run films. That means we are only trading at the industry average of being 20% full.‘

Haji-Ioannou is convinced that his website-based ?yield management‘ techniques, honed at easy-Jet, for attracting larger volumes of customers by offering them cheaper tickets the earlier they book can translate to the movie industry.

It is understood that the losses on the Milton Keynes project have so far been contained to less than £1m. However, Haji-Ioannou is now looking to increase his investment.

?It has been a controlled experiment in Milton Keynes, but stopping at just the one [cinema] was never the aspiration.‘ said the easyGroup spokesman.

?Opening in Leicester Square was the original intention, but we'll have to see what's available.‘

It seems more likely that easyCinema will open a second multiplex cinema in a major suburb, rather than in central London itself.