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Theater: A New Script

Maya Cinemas brings a community-oriented cineplex to underserved North Las Vegas

When Mexican-American film producer Moctesuma Esparza toured the country promoting The Milagro Beanfield War in 1989, he discovered something alarming. “There were no first-rate, quality movie theaters in any of the Latino communities that I visited,” he says. Esparza grew up in East L.A., where in 1968 he was one of 13 high school students arrested for organizing a walkout to protest racism and police brutality. As a producer, he worked on films including Milagro Beanfield (directed by Robert Redford), the Civil War dramas Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, the biopics Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (starring Halle Berry) and Selena (starring Jennifer Lopez), and the HBO original movie Walkout, based on his own 1968 protest experiences.

In 1997, while promoting Selena, Esparza found that the dearth of movie theaters in Latino communities had gotten worse. “I noticed that even the second-run movie theaters in these communities had all closed,” he says. “And so I was able to, doing a little bit of investigation, determine that this was a national pattern that had to do with the development of big malls and big-box stores and lifestyle centers and regional shopping centers, where megaplexes were being built.”

Those observations led him to found Maya Cinemas in 2000, with the goal of returning those theater experiences to the communities where they’d been lost. “I saw that as a business opportunity, to be able to bring back entertainment, which I knew from my own personal family experience was cherished,” Esparza says. “And an opportunity to do redevelopment, to bring jobs, to revitalize communities.”

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With five locations in California, Maya will open a 14-screen theater in North Las Vegas next month. It’s part of a broader redevelopment initiative in the city, and the 67,000-square-foot Maya Cinemas complex, across from the North Las Vegas City Hall, is set to include a number of other tenants, although Maya will be the only business there when the facility opens. However, Esparza says, “many, many retail establishments” have expressed interest in being there.

Even as the only business in the complex, Maya will be an impressive attraction, with an 8,000-square-foot lobby and all the amenities that modern moviegoers have come to expect. That includes beer and wine, an arcade, a café, and auditoriums with plush luxury seating. “They take up double the room, so we made the theater a little bit bigger so that we could have more seats,” Esparza says. That doesn’t mean that Maya will be charging high prices, though, and Esparza says that compared to surrounding theaters, “We’re going to be less, and for a nicer product.”

Coming into an area where theater options are limited is another key element of Maya’s business plan. While North Las Vegas has four other movie theaters, the closest to Maya, the Regal Cinemas at Texas Station, is a 10-minute drive away. Esparza calls areas like this “entertainment deserts,” and says that any future Maya development here would focus on a similar area. “We have a really rigorous criteria for where we go, because basically we like to go where there’s nobody else,” he says.

As for the movies themselves, Maya Cinemas locations primarily showcase the same blockbuster movies as other chains, with a smaller emphasis on specialty releases, including “art films, foreign films, Spanish-language films, American Latino films, documentaries,” depending on local demand. “We look to bring whatever is missing that the audience would love to see,” Esparza explains. That could include Spanish-language dubs of Hollywood releases, especially animated movies, although that’s not the company’s main focus.

The point, Esparza says, is to be welcoming and supportive of the local community. “First off, our staff looks like the community that we’re in. It’s a rainbow,” Esparza says. “We find that it’s word of mouth that is the really powerful tool for us. People have a great experience, they’re treated with respect, they have a great time, it’s a beautiful venue, and they come back.”