We love movie posters.
Third generation of movie lovers
Started in the 1960's as a poster exchange, Consolidated Theatre Services serviced a thousand plus movie theatres across the country, including drive-ins. The big world events over the last 60 years have influenced films or could it be that films have influenced the world events. We are a culture hooked on movies, characters, stories, celebrities and glamour.
Shelly Candel, President and owner, started out, like many of our customers, an avid movie poster fan; a fan with an appreciation of movies, art and design. A strong devotion to the art of movie posters led her to buy-out a Theater Exchange*, which garnered a collection of thousands of movie posters from the 1940s to the 1990s. Friends and family encouraged her to grow her business which resulted in the opening of the original Movie Poster Warehouse in Toronto in 1993. With a skeleton staff of only herself and one other, Shelly established a store front with hundreds of posters on display through which customers were able to browse. She also created a mail-in catalog of her entire inventory which she would then mail out to interested customers. This catalog was the primary source of mail orders until 1996 when, by the suggestion of a University student, Shelly decided to take her catalog to the World Wide Web. At the time, there were only a few other poster vendors online, and certainly none with the breadth of original material offered by Movieposter.com. The initial online site was merely a place where Shelly could easily have a form for customers to fill out in order to receive the mailing catalog. With Shelly’s growing poster collection, it quickly became a redundancy issue as the catalog was virtually out of date as soon as it was mailed. It wasn’t until 2000 that our former Tech. Dept arrived and created our online database where we were able to create a shopping base for people to purchase directly on the site. The staff soon grew to a whopping 7 people (small companies rule!) and with a few location changes, the store is running better than ever at our current Leslie st office. It’s been a long road for Shelly and new managing officer David, her son (family business Duh!), but it was surely worth it for the movie poster fan at heart!
*Theater exchanges were companies who supplied local movie theaters with their posters for display.
Emotions and movies go together
For generations, films have had the ability to evoke memories in our lives. From childhood, to juggling life as adults, going to the movies was an experience we could share with our friends, families, and the hundreds of strangers sitting among us. Together as a community, we get to escape from the trials and tribulations of every day and just enjoy the expressions of life through the magic of cinema.
Movie posters spark joy and memories.”
When you look at a movie poster, especially that of a movie that means something to you; it’s difficult not to recall the stage in your life from when you saw that movie for the first time. Whether that’s the good, the bad, or the ugly, the art and design of movie posters spark memories….
