Two David Pereira, father and son, two months have passed fine-tuning every last detail of the installation of an analog 70 mm projector in the Mk2 Cine Paz on Fuencarral Street in Madrid. The device weighs hundreds of kilos and the baptism was on April 10, when ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ was released, the full version and with an interlude of Tarantino’s film. Madrid, which had not had a room equipped for this format for decades, thus becomes the fourth Spanish city to offer it.
A family inheritance. The Pereira company is sixty years old and is now in its third generation. Young David’s grandfather was the one who installed the Cinerama system in the Proyecciones cinemas in the late 1950s, right in front of the Paz: it is such a specialized trade that it hardly has any replacement. The programming director of the Mk2 Cine Paz, Nacho Martínez-Useros, has confirmed that the projector is permanent and that it will be used in combination with the digital one that is still installed in that room.
70mm map. Until now, the only three Spanish theaters with 70 mm projection were the Barcelona Phenomenadistinguished in 2025 with the Carlo Lizzani award for best European theater, and the Palafox and Aragonia cinemas in Zaragoza. As already We tell about the premiere of ‘The Brutalist‘, the anomaly of Zaragoza was twofold: a medium-sized city with two 70 mm theaters while Madrid still had none. The programming planned at the Paz (Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ and the re-releases of ‘The Hateful Eight’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) will try to soften that gap.
The paradox of timing. The investment comes at a very delicate moment for the Spanish exhibition. According to provisional Comscore data for 2025theaters recorded 65 million spectators and 453 million euros in revenue, 8% less than in 2024. The first semester closed with slight growth, but the second sank 16%, dragged down by an October that was 28% below the previous year and a November that was 31% worse. If we compare with 2019the box office accumulates a drop of more than 38%.
The premium format sweeps. The contrast with the global market is brutal. How we counted When talking about the clash between ‘Dune 3’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, IMAX closed 2025 with 1.28 billion dollars in global box office, its best historical figure, 40% more than 2024 and 13% above the 2019 record. In 2024, premium formats already meant 15.6% of the North American box officecompared to 10.3% in 2019. 7,830 premium screens have been counted worldwide in 2023.
Plan B of studies. Although analog 70 mm is left out of this industrial race to release in IMAX and other premium formats, for obvious reasons of cost and scarcity of available copies, it does play with a similar philosophy: that of turning a visit to the cinema into an event. IMAX’s Omar Berakdar summed up the paradigm shift well when he said that audiences leaving the couch want something they can’t have at home. In Spain, where 87% of the films released in 2025 did not exceed 100,000 euros in revenue and only one Spanish title exceeded one million viewers, the operating margin is no longer in volume. Rooms like Phenomena They billed 1.12 million euros in 2024 with 114,534 viewers: A single screen is capable of competing with multiplexes. It is much more profitable.
Go to the movies as a special plan. A projector like the Mk2 Cine Paz does not pay for itself with daily sessions at a standard price, but rather by turning each screening into an event, sometimes with an intermission included and an operator loading the second reel by hand. There is a model that recovers “well projected” cinema (fewer tickets are sold but they are more expensive) and that is in line with the “eventization” of culture that we have already lived with music. Will this, finally, be the rescue maneuver that will give the definitive oxygen balloon to the rooms?
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