Few executives have commanded a position of power on par with Cineplex Entertainment president and CEO Ellis Jacob, Playback's 2005 Person of the Year. His company's surprising $500-million midsummer acquisition of its larger rival, the Viacom-owned Famous Players, has vaulted the Onex-owned exhibition house into rarefied territory.

Consider this: When legendary movie mogul Adolph Zukor faced the American Federal Trade Commission for the first time in 1923 on charges of monopoly, his Famous Players-Lasky owned 2.2% of the theaters in the U.S. (but took in 67 cents of every dollar at the box office due to its ownership of Paramount content). With the addition of the Famous circuit, Cineplex now has 1,270 of the approximately 3,000 screens in Canada and controls an estimated 75% of the Canadian box office, which amounted to $910 million in 2004.

Jacob ingeniously pre-empted a potential public storm and leveraged his position with Viacom by making advance trips to the Competition Bureau for an advance ruling request.

"It's a testament to a whole other side of Ellis that I wasn't familiar with - political savvy and diplomatic skills," marvels longtime friend and associate, producer Robert Lantos. "It could have gone the other way."

Ellis' argument in Ottawa was the same that Sony-owned Loews made to the Federal Trade Commission when it bought Cineplex in 1998.

"We took the avenue that movies were competing with other forms of entertainment," Jacob recalls in an interview with Playback in the screening room at the Cineplex head office in Toronto. "They didn't accept that as our pitch. They went through market-by-market, and we had to divest close to $100 million of box-office revenue, which is a big number, because it took me a good five years to build [exhibitor] Galaxy to that stage."

Oddly, the Competition Bureau was not concerned, as it notes in its technical backgrounder that "the vast majority of Cineplex Galaxy and Famous Players theaters are located in free zones where they do not compete for film."

Famous and Cineplex had similar buying patterns before the acquisition, but the dust has yet to settle on the deal, so it's hard to say what kind of impact the monopoly will have on the Canadian motion picture industry. One thing is for certain - Ellis Jacob may be the most reluctant and unassuming film mogul in history.

When he immigrated to Canada from India in 1969, his passion wasn't film, but numbers. He completed his bachelor of commerce degree at McGill, and then an MBA at York University, which included a film course, and worked his way up to VP finance at communications firm Motorola. After Motorola COO Harold Kramer left for the CFO job at Cineplex, he suggested Jacob join him as VP finance.

Jacob interviewed with Cineplex principals Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb, but turned them down, saying he didn't really think the movie biz was for him. But they twisted his arm and he landed at Cineplex in October 1987, in the midst of the company's buying spree of theaters all over the U.S., the Film House post shop (now Deluxe Toronto) and a theme park in Florida. At its peak, Cineplex was the largest exhibitor in North America, with 1,800 screens and 500 theaters.