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Garden City Cinemas closing after 40 years
AFTER screening Inception Thursday night, the dream will be over for Garden City Cinemas.
The double cinema house in the Garden City Shopping Centre at McPhillips Street and Leila Avenue will be projecting its last picture shows Thursday night.
The lease on the theatres has expired, according to Pat Marshall, the vice president of communications for Cineplex Entertainment, the company that ran the theatre. Cineplex decided not to renew the lease.
"We did offer jobs to all the staff at our other facilities," said Marshall. The largest movie exhibitor in Canada, Cineplex operates two Silver City multiplexes at Polo Park and St. Vital shopping centres, as well as their Kildonan Place cinemas.
Marshall said the neighbourhoods of northwest Winnipeg and West Kildonan would still be served by the Northgate Cinema City on McPhillips Street, one of two second-run Cinema City multiplexes also operated by Cineplex.
The smallest first-run cinema in town, Garden City was a holdout of old-style sloped-floor cinemas, before cineplexes with stadium seating became the norm for movie houses.
Marshall said the cinema as it is does not mesh with the more modern facilities Cineplex operates.
Opened for business 40 years ago in August of 1970, it was a single auditorium before the multiplex model caught on with moviegoers. About 10 years after it opened, the cinema was "twinned" into two houses, resulting in the theatres's oddball long, narrow design.
In the last few years, the cinema often played movies from India or the Philippines in addition to Hollywood fare.
Along with Inception, the cinema will close out with screenings of the Punjabi film Mel Karrade Rabba.
-- Randall King
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