Leicester has long had a connection to the Odeon cinema brand, one of the most recognised names in British film-going history. The Odeon circuit traces its origins to 1928, when entrepreneur Oscar Deutsch opened his first cinema in Brierley Hill, Staffordshire. Though that original building has since been demolished, Deutsch’s project grew quickly into a national chain. The first cinema to carry the Odeon name opened in 1930 at Perry Barr, Birmingham, designed by architect Harry Weedon in a maritime-influenced Art Deco style.
The Brand Behind the Name
Despite claims by early Odeon publicists that the name was an acronym for “Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation”, the word itself is Ancient Greek – ᾨδεῖον (Ōideion) – meaning “a place for singing”. The term had already been used for cinemas across France and Italy during the 1920s, and the word “Nickelodeon” had been coined as far back as 1888 to describe small picture houses in the United States. The brand’s flagship location, the Odeon Leicester Square in London, opened in 1937 and remains one of the most famous cinema venues in the country.
Ownership and Growth
After Deutsch’s era, the circuit passed to the Rank Organisation, which held ownership for roughly sixty years. In the early 2000s, a series of sales saw the company acquired by Terra Firma, which merged Odeon with UCI Cinemas to create the Odeon UCI Cinemas Group. Most UCI sites adopted the Odeon name in 2006. In November 2016, the group was sold to the American company AMC Theatres, making Odeon part of one of the largest cinema operators in the world. As of 2016, Odeon held the largest market share of any cinema chain in the UK, a position built over nearly nine decades of expansion. Today, the Odeon Cinemas Group also operates under the UCI Cinemas, Cinesa, and Nordic Cinema Group names across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and Greece.