Osgood Perkins, Mike Flanagan, Sean Baker, Zach Lipovsky and Finn Wolfhard are among a group of private investors backing the rescue of Vancouver’s historic Park Theatre.
The new Park Theatre operations team will be led by Corinne Lea, CEO of the city’s Rio Theatre, and will replace Canadian exhibition giant Cineplex in running the iconic cinema on Cambie Street.
“The Rio Theatre is very excited by the opportunity to revive Vancouver’s historic, art-deco Park Theatre in the beloved Cambie Village neighbourhood. We are grateful for the support of this impressive group of film industry professionals, and could not do this 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 on Monday.
Cineplex had been operating Park Theatre under a lease agreement since 2013. The exhibitor ceased operations at the cinema on Sunday, Oct. 26, a Cineplex spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. The exhibitor added it will remove and relocate the theatre’s 70mm projector to a new Cineplex location yet to be named.
Meanwhile, the team behind Rio Theatre, which is also in East Vancouver on Commercial Drive, successfully wrapped talks with the landlord for the Park cinema about putting together a consortium of local and international investors to become the next operator of the historic cinema.
The new investors in Park Theatre include Chris Ferguson (Backrooms, The Young People), director Osgood Perkins (who has shot a host of movies in British Columbia), Mike Flanagan, Oscar winners Sean Baker and Samantha Quan and Zach Lipovsky (Final Destination Bloodlines, Freaks). Other financiers include Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, It), film editor Graham Fortin, sound designer Eugenio Battaglia, post supervisor Andy Levine, film coordinator Jill Orsten and film attorney Christina Bulbrook.
“Film is so central to the essence of Vancouver. I’m thrilled, not only that we were able to save this historic theatre that I went to as a child, but that it was a group of some of our most significant filmmakers who came together to do it,” Longlegs and The Monkey producer Ferguson said in a statement.
The Park Theatre has an historic pedigree after opening on Cambie Street in 1941 with a double bill of Model Wife, starring Joan Blondell and Dick Powell, and The Flame of New Orleans, starring Marlene Dietrech. The Park cinema launched under the ownership of Cineplex Odeon Cinemas, a forerunner of Cineplex and today an operator of multiplexes and out of home destinations.
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