THB #693: Whose CinemaCon Is It Anyway? - The History & The Whining

Pt 1: A Brief History of ShoWest/CinemaCon & Some Public Complaining

I have heard a lot of voices at and around and since CinemaCon this year. I have to admit… I find some of them absolutely stunning. Not because so many of them are so conflicting in such an extreme way… opinions are opinions… but because they make it very clear that, “what we've got here is... failure to communicate.”

I go way back with what is now CinemaCon… to ShoWest, when it was operated by NATO of California and lived at Bally’s. My first ShoWest, which I covered for The Chicago Tribune, was in 1994. And it was magical for me. It was the ShoWest of The Lion King, which many still remember as an all-time high point for the decades-old event, with a partially finished version of what would be the year’s biggest hit, a Cirque-like (and later, Taymor-like) performance in the aisles of the theater, and then a party in a circus tent in the old Aladdin casino lot (not yet rebuilt) with live animals and circus performers.

It was also the ShoWest of Forrest Gump, a Bob Zemeckis film - he h…