Emagine Entertainment
How Partnering Made It All Fall into Place
When Emagine Entertainment brought “The Magic of Movies & More” to Saline in 2017, our community members couldn’t have been more excited about having our own new state-of-the-art Emagine theater – and our business climate couldn’t have been more welcoming to it.
Business in Saline - Emagine Entertainment from SCTN on Vimeo.
“Doing business in Saline has been an enormously gratifying experience,” says Paul Glantz, Chairman of Emagine Entertainment. “From the first public hearing about our plans, everyone in Saline has been so gracious. In fact, Saline’s mayor did a better job of selling the concept than I did! He was our biggest cheerleader.”
Glantz adds, “Some communities strive to be difficult, but I’ll tell you plainly, there’s definitely no ‘department of business prevention’ in Saline.”
Emagine views their Saline location, in the Saline Commons shopping center, to be nearly perfect. “We’re finding that patrons are regularly driving in from as far as 30 or 40 minutes away. Though we’re about a mile east of Downtown Saline, we know that many customers are making a whole day or evening of it. They’re shopping and dining all around town.”
Emagine has found our community to provide a superior workforce. “We have a terrific general manager in Saline,” Glantz says, “and many, many of our teammates are Saline High School students. They’re hard-working and reliable, and they bring a spirit of fun to the place.”
To help make Saline’s new Emagine Theater become a reality, the Saline Business Recruitment Team joined with Emagine Entertainment in working flexibly and creatively with A. F. Jonna, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based developer and manager of Saline Crossings.
“We could see that the property provided us with a special opportunity,” says Glantz, “but we prefer to be a property owner rather than a tenant. The Saline team helped us work it out with A.F. Jonna to turn the property into a condominium that allowed us to own our building.”
Emagine Entertainment currently has nine theaters in Michigan and Illinois. Two more Emagine theaters are now in development: one in Michigan and one in Wisconsin. The company also licenses the Emagine brand to eight theaters in Minnesota. There are now over 200 Emagine movie screens in all.
According to Glantz, it is hard to imagine a more positive development process than what Emagine Entertainment experienced in Saline. He says, “When a community is open to possibilities and determined to make things work – as Saline clearly is – you find solutions where all stakeholders’ interests converge and all partners get the results they set out to achieve.”
