Bremen 4
6851 159th Street,
Tinley Park,
IL
60477
6851 159th Street,
Tinley Park,
IL
60477
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I remember first seeing these films at the Bremen: “Rocky II” (1979) “Ordinary People” (1980) (The original) “Clash of the Titans”(1981) “The Toy” (1983) “The Verdict” (1983)
According to this article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, the BremenTowne Theatre opened as a single-screen house. There is a photo of the 1,023-seat auditorium. The house was designed by the architectural firm of Robert Taylor & Associates.
For what it’s worth, newspaper articles from 1971 also call the house the BremenTowne Theatre, spelled and capitalized exactly the way Boxoffice did it. A Chicago Tribune article from as late as January 19, 1994, still called it the Brementowne Theater.
Both CinemaTour and our description say that the theater was moved to the other side of the mall and rebuilt as a quad at some point. DeadMalls has a page for the Brementown Mall which says pretty much the same thing, but it also says that the Mall opened in 1973, which means the theater would have predated it by two years.
The exterior photo and an architectural drawing illustrating the Boxoffice article show an outside entrance to the theater, so I suspect that DeadMalls is right about the mall having been built in 1973. Whether the original theater building was demolished or incorporated into the mall and converted to another use, I don’t know. All the information available on the Internet is pretty sketchy.
If the theater did move from the west end of the mall to the east end when the mall was built, then we actually have two entirely different theaters of the same name here. The house that opened in 1971 was a big, impressive theater. It would have been terribly wasteful for it to have been demolished, or even converted to another use, after only a couple of years, but it looks like that might be what happened.
The BremenTowne Theater opened Jan 29, 1971 as a 1000 seat twin.
I’m not sure what the last movie I saw at Bremen was, but I know we rode our bikes there to see Terror in the Aisles and my friend Pat’s mom drove us there to see Cannonball Run 2. I mostly remember the mall itself and the drive around the mall that most teenagers did.
My memory is that after the merger it was in the C-O listings for a while before going independant.
Because this theatre was an Essaness, per Bryan’s comment above, was it ever a Cineplex-Odeon?
I went here once. It was a decent place: similar to the Belvidere in Waukegan and very much a blast from the past. This was probably around 1999-2000.
Bremen was a great theatre. I have many fond memories there from my childhood. It’s sad to know it’s no longer in operation.
I don’t know when the Bremen went to second run, but I remember going there in high school in the late 80’s, and by this time it was second run.