Osgood Perkins, Mike Flanagan, Sean Baker, Zach Lipovsky and Finn Wolfhard are among a group of private investors supporting the rescue of Vancouver’s historic Park Theater.
The new Park Theater operational team will be led by Corinne Lea, CEO of the city’s Rio Theatre, and will replace Canadian exhibition giant Cineplex in the management of the iconic Cambie Street cinema.
“The Rio Theater is very excited about the opportunity to revive Vancouver’s historic, art deco Park Theater in the beloved Cambie Village neighborhood. We are grateful for the support of this impressive group of film industry professionals, and we couldn’t do it without them! After almost two decades of rocking the Rio, we look forward to this expansion and bringing the same fun, energy and passion to a new location,” Lea said in a statement Monday.
Cineplex had operated Park Theater under a lease agreement since 2013. The operator ceased operations at the theater on Sunday, October 26, a Cineplex spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter Monday. The operator added that it would remove and relocate the theater’s 70mm projector to a new Cineplex location that has not yet been named.
Meanwhile, the team behind the Rio Theatre, which is also in East Vancouver on Commercial Drive, has successfully concluded negotiations with Cinema owner Park regarding assembling a consortium of local and international investors to become the historic cinema’s next operator.
New investors in the Park Theater include Chris Ferguson (Backrooms, Young people), director Osgood Perkins (who has filmed many films in British Columbia), Mike Flanagan, Academy Award winners Sean Baker and Samantha Quan and Zach Lipovsky (Final Destination Bloodlines, Monsters). Other financiers include Finn Wolfhard (Stranger things, that), editor Graham Fortin, sound designer Eugenio Battaglia, shift supervisor Andy Levine, film coordinator Jill Orsten and film attorney Christina Bulbrook.
“Cinema is at the heart of what Vancouver is all about. I’m thrilled, not only that we were able to save this historic theater that I went to as a kid, but also that it was a group of some of our most important filmmakers who came together to do it,” Long legs And The monkey » Producer Ferguson said in a statement.
The Park Theater has a historic pedigree having opened on Cambie Street in 1941 with a double bill of Model womanwith Joan Blondell and Dick Powell, and The Flame of New Orleanswith Marlène Dietrech. The Park Cinema was launched under the ownership of Cineplex Odeon Cinemas, the forerunner of Cineplex and today an operator of multiplexes and out-of-home destinations.
