After going darkish within the early days of the pandemic, a former ArcLight theater in El Segundo will reopen with a brand new proprietor and title Monday as a luxurious cinema supposed to pry film viewers off their couches at dwelling.
After $10 million in upgrades, CinemaWest Seaside Cities could have 16 screens and a Pink’s Sizzling Canine restaurant that may serve alcohol and in addition be open to non-moviegoers.
It will likely be the 18th location for CinemaWest, a Petaluma, Calif.-based theater chain that operates cineplexes in California and Idaho, and a flagship location for the corporate “on par with personal screening rooms at main studios,” proprietor Dave Corkill stated.
CinemaWest Seaside Cities would be the first theater to open in Los Angeles County in 2025 and one in every of solely a handful that will open this yr, in response to IJM Enterprises, a movie show improvement guide.
With moviegoing habits scrambled within the age of streaming, film theaters have misplaced a few of their luster as anchor tenants at buying malls and different industrial facilities. CinemaWest’s landlord, although, is banking on the theater being a key draw at Continental Park, a 100-acre industrial improvement with 3 million sq. toes of workplace house, eating places, outlets and a resort.
CinemaWest Seaside Cities, seen in a rendering, could have a Pink’s Sizzling Canine restaurant and bar with a separate entrance for non-moviegoers.
(CinemaWest)
“I don’t imagine {that a} movie show is the important thing to attracting workplace tenants,” landlord Richard Lundquist stated, “however I do really feel that the movie show attracts eating places, which then entice workplace tenants, so all of them go hand in hand. I do really feel it’s going to draw enterprise.”
Lundquist is chief govt of Continental Improvement Corp., which developed the sprawling complicated that straddles Rosecrans Avenue within the cities of El Segundo and Manhattan Seaside. Different new additions to Continental Park are an Erewhon market set to open subsequent month and Mattel’s tv and film manufacturing studios that may open in late spring, he stated.
Consistent with a motion throughout the theater trade, CinemaWest Seaside Cities will supply options that mimic the expertise of watching a film at dwelling, equivalent to reclining seats. However it’s going to additionally have parts obtainable solely in a industrial setting, together with a 4DX theater that may incorporate on-screen visuals with a wide range of movement seat results, scents, and such environmental results as rain, lightning, fog and wind. Development on that theater is predicted to be accomplished subsequent month.
There may be additionally a theater with an expansive display screen format referred to as ScreenX, a multi-projection system with a 270-degree subject of view that extends the picture throughout the principle display screen onto the theater’s right- and left-side partitions to immerse the viewers within the film.
It additionally has a giant-screen theater with Dolby Atmos encompass sound.
Pink’s, a well known Los Angeles restaurant within the Fairfax district, will open a department on the theater serving sizzling canine, hamburgers and milkshakes. It should even have a full bar.
ArcLight launched in 2002 on the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with a pioneering luxurious expertise that has since change into extra mainstream. ArcLight had 11 places, together with six within the Los Angeles space, which closed in March 2020 as theaters had been ordered shut for the pandemic.
ArcLight introduced in April 2021 that it will not reopen its theaters.
The CinemaWest theater opening is a shiny spot in a tough interval for the film enterprise. L.A.’s movie manufacturing group not too long ago completed an unsettling yr as 2024 noticed the second-lowest degree of manufacturing in Los Angeles ever, in response to the nonprofit company FilmLA. It topped solely 2020, the yr of pandemic-related shutdowns.
