For Stefan Kern, there’s a terrible irony to Tony – the new biopic film about late celebrity chef, TV host and writer Anthony Bourdain – being pulled at the last minute from an independent cinema in downtown Toronto.
“He was punk rock, he was the champion of mom and pops, he was very anti-establishment,” says Kern, director of operations and exhibition for Imagine Cinemas. “He chastised a lot of major chains and corporations for being soul-less and not having the same care and love put into their products as the independents, and that’s exactly us.”
In light of that, Imagine dropped the gloves last week by sending customers an email informing them that screenings of the film at its Carlton location in Toronto were being cancelled just four days before it was set to open due to a last-minute change of heart by distributor A24.
“Unfortunately, A24 has made the decision to withdraw Tony from our location due to antiquated clearing practices, ones that still exist in Canada because of the hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share that exists in this country,” the message read.
The email from Imagine, a family owned chain based in Windsor, Ont., that has 11 locations in Ontario and British Columbia, went on to urge customers to file complaints with the Competition Bureau about unfair business practices in theatrical distribution in Canada.
Speaking with Do Not Pass Go, Kern succinctly expanded on the message. “This is a unique Canadian problem,” he says. “There is severe market concentration.”
Independent theatre operators are often careful to avoid explicitly naming the source of this problem for fear of retaliation, but Imagine’s customer communications makes the culprit plain enough: Cineplex.
With more than 150 theatres across the country and about 75 per cent of the box office share, the company is one of Canada’s truest and – as one distributor has put it – “absolute” monopolies. It is the “hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share” referred to in the email.
As a number of independents have told Do Not Pass Go, the company holds immense sway over what films are shown where and when by maintaining and enforcing so-called clearance zones, or geographic areas around its locations. Competing theatres often aren’t allowed to screen a film until a nearby Cineplex is done with it.
The practice is a holdover from an earlier era of film exhibition where several large competing chains existed, each of which would sign up exclusive rights to releases. According to the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors (NICE), which represents 140 independents (but not Imagine), Canada is the only country in which clearance zones are still applied.
These restrictions are seriously affecting more than two-thirds of members, NICE says. And what makes matters worse is that the zones are not officially defined and are instead arbitrarily decided and enforced by Cineplex.
For its part, the company denies such accusations and says distributors make their own decisions, as is the case with Tony and the Carlton in Toronto.
“We didn’t make a complaint,” says Michelle Saba, vice-president of communications at Cineplex. “It is up to film distributors to decide where they play their films. Cineplex does not own the rights to the movies that appear on our screens. We license them from distributors to play in our theatres.”
But distributors are also subject to retaliation by the chain, according to NICE. If Cineplex requests a film be pulled from an independent and the distributor doesn’t follow suit, its films may end up blocked from Cineplex theatres in response.
“It’s not written down anywhere, no cinema can look at a map and see what other cinemas are in their zone. Everything is quite amorphous,” says NICE director Sonya William. “Is there a smoking gun, was there a phone call, is there an email? People have figured out over time that writing this stuff down is maybe not a good idea.”
Jaime Panoff, head of international publicity at New York-based A24, did not return requests for comment.
What makes the Tony situation disheartening for Kern is the fact that Imagine has an existing relationship with the film’s director, Toronto native Matt Johnson, who attended several screenings of his previous film, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, at the Carlton last year.
The theatre posted among the best box office results in North America for that film, he says, which was distributed by Elevation Pictures and recently won Best Motion Picture at the Canadian Screen Awards.
“It was such a cultural moment, with that film set in Toronto,” Kern says. “The whole city came down for his film.”
A representative for Johnson declined to comment.
The Competition Bureau says it is aware of the issues raised by Imagine, but a spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency is examining them.
Tony is the fifth film from rising star Johnson, who also directed BlackBerry (2023), a humorous telling of the Canadian smartphone pioneer’s rise and fall. Tony, meanwhile, focuses on Bourdain’s early days as an apprentice chef in Provincetown, Mass.
Before he took his own life in 2018, Bourdain was an ardent supporter of independent businesses – especially restaurants. In a 2011 interview with the Harvard Business Review, for example, Bourdain lamented that many U.S. cities lacked the sort of independent street markets found across Asia.
“I don’t understand why we don’t have that in the States,” he said. “It would be good for business, good for the economy, good for our health, and a great alternative to the usual suspects.”
🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:
🏈 SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Fans of the ROGERS-owned Toronto Maple Leafs were angry this week as ticket prices for the upcoming season were announced, and not surprisingly, they’re going up. What surprised – and upset – fans was that the increase comes after the team posted the fifth-worst record in the NHL last season. As the Toronto Star notes, prices for seats with obstructed view at a mid-week game against non-marquee teams start at $127. Rogers’ MAPLE LEAF SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT says the new prices are only two per cent higher than last year’s, which is lower than the national inflation rate. That said – if fans are mad now, it might be a case of you ain’t seen nothing yet…
The Los Angeles Times has a worthwhile feature story on the accelerating trend of PRIVATE EQUITY purchasing interests in sports franchises. While such investment can lead to spending on venue improvements and better player contracts, the article also notes that it tends to lead to higher ticket prices as the firms look to extract big returns. With ROGERS cementing full ownership of MLSE and therefore all of Toronto’s major teams last month, the cable giant is now shopping around a stake in its sports division. The company reportedly has a long list of potential partners, with private equity among them.
Speaking of ROGERS, there’s continuing confusion among concert-goers between the two Toronto stadiums bearing the company’s name. Fans continue to show up for shows at the downtown Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays play, rather than the new-ish Rogers Stadium in the north of the city. As some affected fans say, the similarity in names is leading to frustrating last-minute travel across the city and missing opening acts. Even The Beaverton has chimed in, with the parody site posting a story about how the Rogers Centre has installed detailed directions to Rogers Stadium outside every gate. Our suggestion: fresh off finally getting rid of the hated statue of company founder Ted Rogers in favour of Jays great Joe Carter, the company should bring back the name that fans originally selected for the downtown stadium – SkyDome. Heck, at this point we’d even settle for Rogers SkyDome.
🛒 GROCERIES
Canned vegetable giant NORTERA’s attempt to acquire B&G’s FOODS’ Canadian brands, which include Green Giant and Le Sieur, is a “merger to monopoly,” according to documents filed with the Competition Tribunal. The combined companies would have a share of more than 90 per cent of canned vegetables sales to retailers in Canada and more than 80 per cent of frozen core vegetables, with internal Nortera documents showing planned price increases shortly after the deal closes, according to an affidavit from Serge Moresi, vice-president of competition modelling at consulting firm Charles River Associates. A separate affidavit from Jacqueline Byers, a manager of competition law with the Competition Bureau, says that “all other suppliers of branded core vegetables in Canada have insignificant sales” compared to the two companies. Canadian households spent $255 on canned vegetables and other vegetable preparations in 2023, up 14.8 per cent from 2021, and $97 on frozen and dried vegetables, up 27.6 per cent, according to the document. Both affidavits were filed to support the Bureau’s challenge of the transaction, which Quebec-based Nortera says is needed to help preserve Canada’s long-term food stability.
Grocery giant LOBLAW flip-flopped on labelling out-of-country produce this week, with the company reversing a move to ditch signs after a backlash from customers. The company initially decided to cut back earlier this month after receiving fines from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for some signs being “misleading.” But with heightened trade tensions with the United States, customers have been vocal about wanting the signs back – and wanting them to be accurate. The company on Tuesday said it is planning to restore the signs, as well as the “T” labels on U.S. products that are affected by tariffs.
💾 BIG TECH
The huge news of the week, besides the ludicrous supposed renaming of Lake Ontario, is that META has settled a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states over the company designing platforms intended to addict young people to them. Meta has agreed to pay $18 billion (U.S.) and change features on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, such as daily two-hour usage limits and a block on night-time activity. The company must also implement better age-verification tools to prevent kids under 13 from making accounts. There is already considerable debate about what these changes mean, especially in light of regulatory efforts either in place or under way in a number of countries – including Canada – to effect the same results. Reactions so far range from beliefs that the settlement is a major turning point in how the attention economy works to arguments that the result actually helps Meta by costing it little and slowing down competitors even more.
✈️ AIRLINES
Flight attendants at WESTJET this week ratified a new collective agreement with the airline, with more than 90 per cent approving the deal. The agreement will give workers a 13-per-cent wage hike this fall, followed by a further 2.75-per-cent increase in January and 2.5-per-cent improvement in 2028. The airline’s attendants went on a one-day strike earlier this summer over unpaid hours on the ground, which followed a similar-but-lengthier labour action last year by their counterparts at AIR CANADA.
Europe, long singled out by passenger rights activists in Canada as the gold standard for consumer protections, has strengthened its rules. The EUROPEAN UNION has added a 30-day deadline for airlines to respond to passenger claims and set nine months as a filing deadline to replace a patchwork of limits across countries. Regulators also resisted efforts by airlines to weaken the rules and held firm on compensation levels, which range between 250 and 600 euros for delays of three hours or more. The new amendments to EU261, the passenger rights rules, also now ban hidden carry-on fees and introduce requirements that children be seated with family members, among other additions. Gabor Lukacs, president of Canadian advocacy group Air Passenger Rights, says Europe’s new measures only further highlight how deficient Canada’s protections are. “In Canada, the trend has been to empty passenger rights from any practical meaning,” he says. “The EU already had the gold standard of passenger protection, which lended itself for speedy determination of eligibility to compensation, unlike Canada, where determining the fate of $400 requires a full day.”
🛢️ RESOURCES
Regulated utility monopoly ENBRIDGE had a busy week, with a $600 million (U.S.) acquisition of an oil business in the United States and a $2.7 billion (Canadian) venture capital deal to fund its Westcoast natural gas pipeline system. The U.S. deal will see the Calgary-based company acquire hundreds of kilometres of Houston-based Salt Creek Midstream’s crude oil pipeline assets near Texas and New Mexico, though observers point out that increasing cross-border political tensions could play a role in how this transaction plays out. The Westcoast deal, meanwhile, will see investment firms KKR and Apollo form a joint venture to fund expansion of Enbridge’s Aspen Point and Sunrise programs in British Columbia and Alberta.
🥊 COMPETITION
Canada had fewer MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS in the second quarter of 2026, but the value of deals that did happen was up considerably, according to a report from investment bank Crosbie & Co. The overall number of transactions was down 12 per cent from the first quarter to 600, but their value rose 51 per cent to $114.5 billion thanks to a record 23 mega-deals accounting for $99.8 billion. The bank attributes the “unusually noisy” conditions to higher energy prices resulting from the Iran war, renewed inflation concerns and uncertainty around trade policy. “Macro uncertainty can make sellers hesitate to test the market, but we are definitely not seeing much impact on high-quality businesses,” said Crosbie managing director Sadat Mirza in a release. “Ironically, this environment can work in favour of high-quality sellers – with fewer deals in the market, they are attracting more attention and stronger competition from buyers.”
The COMPETITION BUREAU is becoming more bearish, according to a new review by Torys law firm, with merger reviews getting longer and more complex. The enforcement agency’s new tone, in place since amendments to the Competition Act came into force in 2024, is resulting in increased litigation and greater deal uncertainty. “The Bureau clearly views the amendments as a green light to pursue a more interventionist approach to merger enforcement,” the firm says. “That approach is translating into longer and more burdensome reviews, heightened scrutiny of non-reportable transactions, and an increased willingness to litigate. For transaction parties, the result is greater execution risk and increased importance of identifying and assessing competition issues at an early stage of the deal process.”
🚨 COMING UP
Canada is a country where everything is expensive, but what we’re paying for is thoroughly meh. So says EEAMAAN KHAN, a Canadian expat and strategy director at ExecCap Advisors in Chicago. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to discuss the concept of “premium mediocrity,” and how Canadians have been forced to accept it thanks to a highly concentrated economy.
Re Tony, the Bytowne in Ottawa (a NICE member) is showing it now. What's Imagine's problem?
Re Groceries, I received an official-looking email informing me that applications are now open to benefit from the $500 million settlement in the Loblaws/Weston Bread case. I've reported it as spam to <spam@fightspam.gc.ca> since it was essentially of anonymous origin. Counting on you to let me know of any news about this case!