[2] During the 1930s, it grew rapidly by acquisitions and an ambitious building programme under the direction of chief architect W. R. Glen, who had been appointed in about 1929[3] and maintained a distinct house style.

After he died in 1940, his widow Catherine sold a large number of shares to Warner Brothers,[5] who eventually became the largest shareholders and able to exercise control, though ABPC was separately quoted on the London Stock Exchange.

By 1945 it operated over 400 cinemas (usually called the Savoy or Regal) and was second only to Rank's Odeon and Gaumont chains.

In 1967, Seven Arts, the new owners of Warner, decided to dispose of its holdings in ABPC and subsequently EMI launched a successful take-over bid for the company.

Associated British Picture Corporation was later to be renamed Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment Ltd, although the cinema chain retained its name.

Eventually, the advent of largely American-owned multiplexes led to the end of barring and the old distributor alignments, which had in any case been rendered largely irrelevant by cinema closures often leaving only one cinema in a town, which had access to all films but usually had to give precedence to its traditional alignment (so an Odeon might have a poor "Rank" release in its biggest screen and a big "ABC" release in a small cinema and vice versa).

At the beginning of each Saturday morning session, the "ABC Minors Song" would be played to the tune of 'Blaze Away' by Abe Holzmann (1874–1939), whilst the lyrics were presented on the screen with a bouncing red ball above the words to help the audience keep the place.

[citation needed] In the late 1980s, on the verge of bankruptcy, Cannon was taken over by Italian fraudster Giancarlo Parretti, who then changed the company's name to Pathé Communications, which subsequently bought MGM.

These Cannon cinemas, along with a group of theaters Cannon owned in Holland, were used as part of a phony transaction by Parretti to a holding company purportedly owned by Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, Cinema V; Cinema V was a shell company owned by Parretti's business partner Florio Fiorini, to make it appear that Pathe was paying off their debts to their bank, Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland, when in reality the bank's loans to Pathe had expanded tremendously (including the $184 billion supposedly paid by Cinema V); this was done to prevent the Dutch central bank from finding out about the deepening connection between CLBN, Parretti and Fiorini.