After shuttering in the pandemic, an ArcLight theater gets a second act
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After going dark in the early days of the pandemic, a former ArcLight theater in El Segundo will reopen with a new owner and name Monday as a luxury cinema intended to pry movie viewers off of their couches at home.
Following $10 million in upgrades, CinemaWest Beach Cities will have 16 screens and a Pink’s Hot Dogs restaurant that will serve alcohol and also be open to non-moviegoers.
It will be the 18th location for CinemaWest, a Petaluma-based theater chain that operates cineplexes in California and Idaho, and a flagship location for the company “on par with private screening rooms at major studios,” owner Dave Corkill said.
CinemaWest Beach Cities will be the first theater to open in Los Angeles County in 2025 and one of only a handful that may open this year, according to IJM Enterprises, a movie theater development consultant.
With moviegoing habits scrambled in the age of streaming, movie theaters have lost some of their luster as anchor tenants at shopping malls and other commercial centers. CinemaWest’s landlord, though, is banking on the theater being a key draw at Continental Park, a 100-acre commercial development with 3 million square feet of office space, restaurants, shops and a hotel.
“I don’t believe that a movie theater is the key to attracting office tenants,” landlord Richard Lundquist said, “but I do feel that the movie theater attracts restaurants, which then attract office tenants, so they all go hand in hand. I do feel it will draw business.”
Lundquist is chief executive of Continental Development Corp., which developed the sprawling complex that straddles Rosecrans Boulevard in the cities of El Segundo and Manhattan Beach. Other new additions to Contintental Park are an Erewhon market set to open next month and Mattel’s television and movie production studios that will open in late spring, he said.
In keeping with a movement across the theater industry, CinemaWest Beach Cities will offer features that mimic the experience of watching a movie at home such as reclining seats. But it will also have elements available only in a commercial setting such as a 4DX theater that will incorporate on-screen visuals with a variety of motion seat effects, scents, and such environmental effects as rain, lightning, fog and wind. Construction on that theater is expected to be completed next month.
There is also a theater with an expansive screen format called ScreenX, a multi-projection system with a 270-degree field of view that extends the image across the main screen onto the theater right- and left-side walls that is intended to immerse the audience in the movie.
The permanent closure comes after a year of shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It also has a giant-screen theater with Dolby Atmos surround sound.
Pink’s, a well-known Los Angeles restaurant in the Fairfax District, will open a branch at the theater serving hot dogs, hamburgers and milkshakes. It will also have a full bar.
ArcLight launched in 2002 at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with a pioneering luxury experience that has since become more mainstream. ArcLight had 11 locations, including six in the Los Angeles area, which closed in March 2020 as theaters were ordered shut for the pandemic.
ArcLight management announced in April 2021 that it would not reopen its theaters.
The CinemaWest theater opening is a bright spot in a rough period for the movie business. L.A.’s film production community recently finished an unsettling year as 2024 marked the second lowest level of production in Los Angeles ever, according to the nonprofit agency FilmLA. It topped only 2020, the year of pandemic-related shutdowns.
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