There’s a recent growth spurt in the cinema sector here in Richmond lately, or at least in the plans for new cinemas. In today’s RTD, “Lease signed for cineplex” lays out the plans for Regal Cinemas to open a 16-screen digital theater complex at Westchester Commons, at the intersection of 288 and Midlothian Turnpike.
As I’m counting (and I may be missing a theater or two, please chime in if you know of one that I’ve missed!), that makes four either announced or opened within the past year.
The others that I know are:
- Regal’s 16-screen cineplex at Southpark Mall, which opened in July 2007
- “Movieland” at Boulevard Square (the old Richmond Steel facility)
- unknown branding or official naming, but the location is at the corner of Mechanicsville Turnpike and Creighton Road — across Creighton from the Kroger/American Family shopping center
And of course, each of these cineplexes have the accompanying retail and sometimes residential component coming along with them.
In the case of the Westchester Commons theater, it is part of a much larger development being developed by Zaremba Group, Watkins Center, which will contain more than a million SF of retail space, 1,600 residential units, and 2 million SF of office space (per Zaremba’s website). The entire development is scheduled to be open for business in spring of 2009. Here are the plans for Westchester Commons, as supplied by Zaremba Group.
I hope the Westchester Commons’ Regal Cinemas has common sense to make sure that they include the equipment for open captions/subtitles.
I was relentless in pressuring Southpark Mall to add it. They did. The more cinemas include them the more choices we get to watch and enjoy the films. There are only *two* cinemas that we can enjoy with limited choices of films — Southpark and Short Pump — and that is travesty.
Cheers,
R-
Ridor: Thanks for the input. That is surprising that you have had to twist the arms of cinema management that much to get the facilities setup for a fairly large segment of the population. From what I understand, the movie-going public has been shrinking over the years. I would expect the movie theaters would want to do anything they can lure people back out of their homes.