Copley Place Cinemas
100 Huntington Avenue,
Boston,
MA
02116
100 Huntington Avenue,
Boston,
MA
02116
8 people
favorited this theater
Showing 51 - 75 of 134 comments
I took a walk through the Copley Place mall this evening. Most of the side corridor leading to the cinemas has now been boarded up and blocked off. Two narrow passages remain, one leading to Chili’s restaurant, the other to Brentano’s bookstore and the restrooms. Two of the four escalators in this corridor have also been closed.
Upstairs, the entire former food court is also closed and blocked off; only Au Bon Pain and a very lonely Legal Sea Foods remain open. So it looks like the new Barneys New York store will take up both floors.
I did find a side door that someone had left unlocked, so I briefly wandered into the former cinema lobby and opened the door to theatre #5. All the seats were still there, but the screen had been ripped. Since I wasn’t sure how long I could stay there before getting caught (and possibly arrested), I didn’t open the doors to any of the other cinemas.
According to Boston Globe articles published at the time, the Sack Copley Place opened to the public on Monday, February 13, 1984 with a four-day festival of classic films, with admissions going to the non-profit Fund for the Arts. The 18 films were chosen by a poll of Sack Theatres patrons.
On Feburary 13 and 15, they showed Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin' in the Rain, Dr. Zhivago, The Philadelphia Story, The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
On February 14 and 16, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Man for All Seasons, Dr. Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia, Chariots of Fire, A Clockwork Orange, Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, and Godfather II.
The theatre opened for regular programming on Friday, February 17 with The Dresser, Entre Nous, And the Ship Sails On, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Strange Invaders, The Good Fight (on the ICA Cinema’s screen) and a Russian version of King Lear (on a screen designated for Peter Sellars' Boston Shakespeare Company). Yes, that’s only seven films on nine screens, but that’s what the Globe articles said.
Starting on February 29, Sellars and the Boston Shakespeare Company presented a program of American musicals made between 1929 and 1933. He intended to show 50 films, but the series ended prematurely on April 12, after only 21 films, due to poor ticket sales. The BSC’s screen then reverted back to Sack for regular commercial use.
I e-mailed the contact address for BostonFilmFestival.org and asked what would happen to the festival now that Copley Place is closed. He replied:
“Thank you for your interest in The Boston Film Festival. This year’s dates are September 9 – 18. We will continue to use Loews Boston Common and are looking at other venues.”
Ron: The screen count has had its ups and downs. Thanks for doing the research.
According to Boston Globe newspaper archives, the Copley Place added its 10th and 11th screens some time in 1989. A March 23 article said the work would be done by Memorial Day of that year, but I don’t know if that actually happened. The Cheri added its fourth screen in November 1989.
So, here are the numbers of screens in the city of Boston for Sack/USACinemas/Loews, from 1983 to the present. (Doing research before 1983 would require me to visit a library and look through old newspapers and microfilms, to find out facts such as when the Gary and Savoy closed, the Paris was bought, the Pi Alley was twinned, the Beacon Hill was triplexed, etc.)
[Sack]
Jan 1983: 7 theatres, 15 screens
May 1983: 6 theatres, 14 screens (Saxon closes)
Feb 1984: 7 theatres, 23 screens (Copley Place opens)
[uSACinemas]
May 1986: 8 theatres, 28 screens (Nickelodeon bought)
Aug 1987: 7 theatres, 26 screens (Pi Alley closes)
[Loews]
End 1989: 7 theatres, 29 screens (two screens added to Copley Place, one to Cheri)
Nov 1992: 6 theatres, 26 screens (Beacon Hill closes)
Mar 1993: 5 theatres, 25 screens (Paris closes)
Oct 1994: 4 theatres, 22 screens (Charles closes)
May 1996: 3 theatres, 20 screens (Cinema 57 closes)
Feb 2001: 2 theatres, 15 screens (Nickelodeon closes)
Jul 2001: 3 theatres, 34 screens (Boston Common opens)
Nov 2001: 2 theatres, 30 screens (Cheri closes)
Jan 2005: 1 theatre, 19 screens (Copley Place closes)
Slightly correcting the above — after Exeter closed and USACinemas bought the Nickelodeon, they had 28 screens. THAT was probably the high point.
We’re still looking into it, crunching the numbers, but it is a definite possibility. Our biggest concern (believe it or not) is that we would scare away our regular customers there. But I personally would push for it.
Tom N asked: “If you add up all the screens at the Boston Common and Fenway, do those pretty much equal Sack/USA at their peak in the city of Boston?”
In 1984, after Copley Place opened, Sack had 23 screens in Boston Proper*, Nickelodeon had 5 screens, and Exeter Street had one screen. I believe this was their high point. Although they later added one more screen at the Cheri and two more at the Copley Place, I think this happened only after they started closing their other theatres.
Now, Loews has 19 screens, AMC has 13, and that’s it.
*Boston Proper meaning Beacon Hill, Downtown, Back Bay, and Kenmore/Fenway. It doesn’t include Allston, Brighton, or other outlying neighborhoods.
If/when the Fresh Pond closes and there was no immediate in-zone replacement for its screens, Ian, would the Capitol switch to a first-run policy?
I can see the newspaper headline already: “From Loews to Lowes”.
Well, for us, we don’t want to lease, but even barring that, the RKO Boston has little or no lobby space, no public facilities, no license as a theater, and would require so much in upgrades to bring it to code that it would be cost prohibitive, especially considering you could only put a couple of screens in. Plus Loews is across the street, making booking films a little… uncomfortable… to say the least.
As far as Fresh Pond, we would not want it, because it is too much of competition to us as is, their numbers are so-so and as far as I have heard, the only reason it might close is because their lease is up and the property owner wants to put in a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, so it is doubtful they want the cinema to stay.
We’d rather it close than continue to eat away at our potential audiences.
I have also heard that they intend to build a new multiplex over at Assembly to replace the current theater, but that has been floating around for years. Originally Loews was going to build in the Gateway Center in Everett but the deal never happened when they went into Chapter 11.
Ian, what about the RKO Boston? It was subdivided decades ago and has sat vacant since about 1991. It’s obviously not generating any rent for the building’s landlord. Could it be brought back as a cinema?
And if Loews closes Fresh Pond, would you consider taking it over?
It is just so very difficult for a non-major operator to build in Boston – not only finding the location, but also buying. building or leasing the space is so cost prohibitive.
The organization I work for would love to have 4-6 screens in the back bay or south end but don’t really have 20 million dollars to spend opening a business that won’t return the profit for many many years. If there was an already-existing theater that could be upgraded/expanded, that would be a different story, but there aren’t (and you can’t count the theater district’s old theaters – none of them are viable or available).
I agree wholeheartdly that Boston needs such a place (or two) but it is hard to make it happen.
Ron: You make a good point. The ‘plexes often just multi-screen a mainstream blockbuster. A stand-alone art house theater would maintain art/indy/foreign programming. Just from an urban planning point of view, the city becomes far less diverse if we “mega-structure” everything with huge complexes like Copley Place or the Lowes Boston Common/Millenium Place/Ritz Carlton Towers. Even the Kendall is squirreled off in a desolate location more oriented to cars than a pedestrian streetscape.
Tom N: Perhaps, but since the Boston Common and the Fenway mostly show the same movies (and then sometimes on multiple screens), the result is a sharp drop in the number of different movies being shown at one time within the city of Boston.
I walked into the mall again tonight. They’ve taken down the ‘Loews Copley Place’ sign, the marquee, and the lettering that said CLOSING JAN 30TH. They painted the box office windows and the glass doors solid black. They also put a couple of kiosks with black curtains on either side of the entrance, obscuring some (now-empty) movie poster cases on the walls behind them.
Tom N is correct. If you visited the mall today and didn’t know it used to have a cinema, you’d never find it now.
Ron Newman wrote: “Of these, only Assembly Square and Harvard Square remain from the days of Sack Theatres or USACinemas.” When you think of their omnipresence in the past, that’s pretty amazing. Then again, though, if you add up all the screens at the Boston Common and Fenway, do those pretty much equal Sack/USA at their peak in the city of Boston? I note that the AMC Fenway has some rather big screens.
The only Loews theatres still operating in the Boston area:
Boston Common (19 screens)
Harvard Square, Cambridge (5)
Fresh Pond, Cambridge (10)
Assembly Square, Somerville (12, I think)
Liberty Tree Mall, Danvers (20)
The Loop, Methuen (lots of screens)
Of these, only Assembly Square and Harvard Square remain from the days of Sack Theatres or USACinemas.
I can see another theatre or theatre chain having a use for the projectors and sound equipment from the Copley, but the seats? They were a close second to the size of the screens at the Copley on a scale of undesirability.
Meanwhile, with Loews apparently planning to close (I wouldn’t expect them to open and operate an art house to replace the Copley; that would be akin to Carrot Top giving lessons in subtlety) the Fresh Pond (and, when I was living in the Boston area, there was constant word that the awful – but still-open – time-warp multiplex at Assembly Square in Somerville was on the chopping block) wouldn’t it, um, make sense to maybe replace it with an all-stadium seating megaplex? Unless the people who aren’t going to the Fresh Pond are giving their business to another Loews theatre in the area (and one with plenty of parking, supposedly, as that’s about the only reason for anyone who doesn’t live nearby to see a film at the Fresh Pond), it would be the height of stupidity for Loews to be conceding away all that business.
Loews is the Keystone Cops of theater chains.
And more from him…
“Loews had a no-fault clause and lost the entire weekend. They had an exclusive on a new movie that weekend, Deliver Us From Eva, and it was exclusive for Loews at that location [boston Common], that weekend. The movie tanked and Loews was partly to blame. Loews & the distributor wanted Copley to take the prints, (which we did take their prints of Chicago and Narc), but Simons [owner of the Copley Place mall] refused to let us use the print of an urban-based movie with LL Cool J as the star!
My next story will be about our pick-pocket that hit the cinema up every Friday & Saturday, and would always be left free, because he was a snitch for the Boston Police Department, and they wouldn’t do anything to him!"
More from my correspondent who is a former manager of the Copley Place:
“Just wanted to tell you that a theater in Florida purchased the projectors, sound equipment, and most of the seats and stuff like that. I spoke to my former co-manager on Wednesday and he told me that the Florida company was gutting the theater this week, and expected to be done by today. Chris has his last days of management cleanup on Thursday, and was saying good bye to the building and Loews, as he also closed the Cheri, before being transferred over to Copley. From what was told to me, Loews did not offer the managers any transfer options over to the [boston Common] complex without taking a lesser position.
“There is a very good chance that Loew’s Fresh Pond will be closed before the end of the year. If it isn’t a megaplex of some sort, the small theaters are being relinquished by the big chains.
“I left [Loews] in 2003. I didn’t know that the parent owners that had just bought them out of bankruptcy sold it again to another financial holding company with European and Mexican interests. I know that when I worked for Loews, Fresh Pond was DEAD! Their numbers were abyssmal every night. I wouldn’t doubt if they pruned it from the system. Look what they did in Danvers, they build the new cineplex, and then sold the old building to a company to open up as a theater immediately! I don’t think Loews always thinks in a big picture type manner.”
“The [boston Common] complex is evident of that. They give out more refunds there than most of the northeast combined. When LA Fitness opened in the Tower, the steam in the saunas would set off the smoke detectors for quite sometime until they adjusted their locations. Each and every time that happened, the cinema had to be evacuated. Thats a huge loss! A power transformer blew out in the basement back in 2003. It took 4 days to be replaced…The entire weekend was lost. (Manny Ramirez sued Millenium for the loss of use of his home in the resident section.)”
For Tom N and anyone else interested, I’ve added the AMC Fenway (formerly General Cinema Fenway) and the Loews Boston Common to this site.
I’m not sure these two are “cinema treasures” of any kind, but then neither was the Copley Place. In any event, they are all we have left in Boston now.
R. Newman wrote: <<I bet that within another week, shoppers in the mall won’t even see that a cinema used to be here.>> It will be as though it never existed. Too bad about the loss of the Howard Johnson’s site on Commonwealth; it might have made that area more pedestrian friendly and less institutional.
By the way, I walked past the former Copley Place Cinemas tonight, and workers were already busy taking the place apart. One of them was putting black paint over the box office windows and the theatre doors. Another was carting speakers out through a service door. I tried to wander around looking, but eventually got shooed out.
I bet that within another week, shoppers in the mall won’t even see that a cinema used to be here.