Improbable though it sounds, many people in India looking to splurge on a night out at a luxury movie theater entrust their rupees to a Mexican theater operator: Cinépolis.

“When we decided to enter the Indian market, I can’t tell you how many meetings we devoted to whether we should keep the accent in the company’s name,” Ramón Ramírez Guzmán, the Cinépolis head of corporate communications, told me in the company’s modern headquarters in Mexico City. “I’m glad we did.” But other concessions had to be made by the Mexican executives sent to India to build upscale theaters. “We quickly learned that our strict rules regarding no facial hair on our associates, and the obligatory wearing of our trademark caps, could not be imposed in a society where some people wear beards and turbans for religious reasons,” said Ramírez Guzmán.

Cinépolis, the world’s fourth-largest movie theater chain (behind American giants AMC, Regal, and Cinemark), now operates in 11 countries. More than three-quarters of the chain’s 377 locations are in Mexico, where Cinépolis has theaters in 89 cities, but the company sees Brazil and India (where it now operates 14 multiplexes) as key growth markets. In 2014, Cinépolis plans to add almost as many new screens to its portfolio outside of Mexico as it does within the country.

Cinépolis has not made a major push into what Ramírez Guzmán described as a saturated U.S. market, other than by experimenting with a few screens in California and Florida. In stark contrast to Mexican conglomerates that cross the border to serve predominantly Latino customers, the Southern California Cinépolis theaters are located in affluent, predominantly Anglo places like Del Mar and Laguna Niguel. These higher-end theaters feature full bar and food service and the type of leather upholstery, wood paneling, and muted lights you’d more likely associate with a corporate law firm office than a movie theater. Tickets for a recent showing of the new Captain America movie in Del Mar were $18.50.

America is the birthplace and global hub of cinema, of course, so it’s disconcerting to learn that middle-class Mexicans, and their counterparts in countries like Korea and Russia, may enjoy a better movie-going experience than we do. But the disparity in movie experience makes sense when you consider that these societies got the movie-going bug, and built their cinematic infrastructure, decades after America did.

Until the mid-1990s, Ramírez Guzmán explained, Mexican movie theaters were heavily regulated by the government, which capped ticket prices, deeming movie-going a basic staple like tortillas or beans, thus discouraging any serious innovation and investment. Back then, any run-of-the-mill U.S. multiplex would have been a marvel in Mexico City. But the industry was deregulated in 1994, just at the moment Mexico’s economy finally emerged from its chronic mismanagement. In post-NAFTA Mexico, inflation was tamed, credit became more widely available, and a real estate boom took place across what had been a previously under-retailed nation.

Cinépolis and competitors rushed to build hundreds of theaters around the country. These new multiplexes often anchored new shopping centers catering to the pent-up consumer demands of a rapidly expanding middle class. Cinépolis considers India to be about where Mexico was in the mid-1990s; that is, about to take off.

If the 1990s were an auspicious time to build multiplexes across Mexico in terms of economic developments, technological trends certainly created severe headwinds. As Ramírez Guzmán explained, Mexican movie operators were forced to be especially innovative because they set out to build their business, and encourage a culture of movie-going, precisely at a time when the digital and online revolutions gave people more entertainment options at home and elsewhere.

“Our competition is always going to be free time, and your menu of options in which to invest it,” Ramírez Guzmán said. “So we need to excel at selling emotions and unforgettable shared moments.” Cinépolis prides itself on the fact that all its theaters in Mexico feature digital screens and assigned seats, which you can reserve online.

Cinépolis and other distributors in emerging markets like Mexico, China, India, and Russia are Hollywood’s most cherished heroes these days: They are delivering the industry’s growth. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the domestic box office rose 6 percent from 2008 to 2012 while growing 32 percent internationally. In Mexico, box office grew by 15 percent last year; in China it was up a whopping 28 percent. Movie-going was down, meanwhile, in more developed markets like Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. A top-grossing Hollywood blockbuster 30 years ago earned most of its revenue domestically, but now takes in on average two-thirds of its box-office receipts abroad.

At the new shopping center of Patio Santa Fe in Mexico City, Ramírez Guzmán shows me four different theater concepts within the same multiplex. One theater is a “sala junior” with bean bags, a playground, and a long slide running down the far wall of the auditorium. The idea is to bring your kids 20 minutes before showtime, let them run around and play, and then help them settle down as best they can for the movie. The kids are invited to burn off more energy during an intermission.

A few doors down is a “4DX” auditorium, with licensed Korean 4-D technology. The seats look like something you’d find on an amusement park ride, with built-in speakers and movable bases that allow you to rumble along with the action. Viewers are exposed to a barrage of choreographed special effects within the auditorium including wind gusts, strobe lights, fog, and even the occasional sprinkling of water.

The same complex also features a “Macro XE” auditorium “that is all about sound.” Nearby, in another mall, you’ll find a trademark “Cinépolis VIP” theater with plush, reclining leather seats and a menu that includes shrimp coconut sushi. Imax theaters and “salas de arte” showing film festival fare round out the operator’s offerings.

Back in the U.S., independent movie theaters and chains like AMC and Regal are now playing catch-up, scrambling to roll out the premium movie-going experiences that are now a staple overseas. For too long, the movie-going experience in the United States has been commoditized into a singular cookie-cutter experience, to a point where the advent of cup holders could seem a radical watershed. So today, while the bulk of on-screen content crossing borders remains American, the experience of watching movies—how we digest that content—has been perfected by others.

If Cinépolis and like-minded competitors have their way—and with competition from television and on-demand video heightening, it seems likely—the customized theatergoing experience will change the business in America in the coming years. Theaters will have no choice but to offer different experiences to different demographics, at different prices.

If globalization ever has a happy ending, this is it: more choice, more innovation, more fun—thanks to a quintessentially American experience that’s been enhanced by foreign experimentation.