As a movie kid growing up, Mitch Roberts spent a lot of time in his parents’ local theater. He developed an appreciation for cinema and saw it as an escape from the real world. Years later, he created a one-stop-shop entertainment experience for everyone. Thus, the Evo Entertainment Group was born.
The entertainment group combines all the different elements of out-of-home entertainment, including bowling, video games, restaurant, bar, and cinema. Roberts founded the company in 2014 when he was just 18 years old. He surrounded himself with intelligent and talented people who could teach him things he didn’t know and improve the experience for everyone.
Roberts didn’t want to bring on a bunch of traditional cinema guys because that’s not the only thing they were doing. He wanted people from all aspects of hospitality and entertainment, anything that was attendance-driven or experience-based. One thing that his grandfather always taught him was that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
As the company grew larger, they had to get a little more streamlined and focus on the efficiencies in the business aspect of it. However, they’re still heavily focused on the creative side of it because that was the root of who they were in the beginning. They constantly look for ways to improve or different things that they can do.
In 2020, the pandemic hit, and it was a dramatic event for restaurants, bars, cinemas, and all the things that they do. One thing that COVID did is it highlighted their weaknesses or the places that they could get better. They had to make a quick pivot and turned their parking lots into drive-in theaters, pivoted to food delivery from a mobile app, made pumpkin patches for Halloween, and made a paintball course. It’s just a whole culture of never giving up and constantly pivoting and adapting to the challenges they’re faced with.
Showbiz was their largest deal to date. They were a multitainment brand where they had cinema and bowling as well. When they completed that acquisition, it tripled the size of their company. Now, they’re in 16 venues with 148 screens across Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Wyoming. It was a tremendous change and tremendous step forward for their business and positions them as the largest operator of the cinema entertainment center concept in North America.
In five to ten years, they hope to be a national brand and a positive change for cinema in general. People have prophesized the fall of cinema for a hundred years. Every advancement in technology, every downturn in the economy, people say that it’s going to be the downfall of cinema. But it’s never died. If you provide an experience, a good quality experience, there will always be demand for that. There will always be demand for shared experiences and shared emotions and watching a story unfold on screen. It’s just that they have to consistently adapt, improve, and evolve the way that they show those films on screen. Similar to retail, people say retail’s dead. Retail is not dead. Bad retail is dead. Movie theaters are not dead. They’re not dying. Bad movie theaters are dead or down.