A South Philadelphia movie theater that shuttered during the pandemic is being brought back to life as the city’s lone Imax facility.
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Apple Cinemas is opening a 17-screen multiplex in Riverview Plaza at 1100 S. Christopher Columbus Blvd. sometime next year, according to a press release. The property is owned by Tower Investments.
It will include one Imax high-resolution screen, an Apple spokesperson said. There are no Imax options in Philadelphia proper after the Franklin Institute shuttered its theater in the wake of the pandemic, but there are several in the suburbs.
“A number of our locations in Suburban Philadelphia are among our best performing in the country, so we’re excited to return to the city itself in a prime location with a great partner in Apple Cinemas,” Imax CEO Rich Gelfond said in a statement.
The new Apple location will also include a ScreenX panoramic viewing experience and a theater with Dolby Atmos audio.
Riverview previously housed a Regal United Artists location for nearly three decades before it shuttered in 2020.
Tower CEO Bart Blatstein developed the Riverview, which opened in 1991. He sold it in 2003 to Cedar Property Trust, which had plans for a mixed-use development that never came to fruition. Tower bought the property back in 2022 as the REIT dissolved.
Blatstein has been determined to bring cinema back to the space.
“The theater, to me, it was always the highest and best use for that block,” Blatstein told The Philadelphia Inquirer in October.
“The demographics are amazing. They were amazing when I opened it 30 years ago. They’re even better now. There’s a lot of kids now back in South Philly, in Center City.”
At the time, the Philadelphia 76ers planned to build a new arena on the site of the Fashion District mall at 12th and Filbert Streets, which would have required demolishing the AMC location there.
The team has since decided to stay in South Philly, and the Center City multiplex remains open.
The movie theater industry has experienced a major contraction in the U.S. postpandemic. There were just 5,691 screens nationwide earlier this year, down 14% from 2019.
Operators are investing billions in concepts like dine-in theaters and amenities such as luxury seating as they try to compete with an increasingly dominant streaming ecosystem.
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