My grandparents live about 5 mintues away, so I drove by on Easter Sunday. At least for that day, the theater was being used as a banquet hall. There were tables set up in the well-perserved lobby. Even though the doors were wide open, I was running late, so I didn’t stop to go in.
I believe the theater was part of the Interstate circuit when it opened. I want to say it was originally a one-screen, before being twinned sometime in the late 70s.
The theater’s marquee on Kingsley is still there. Various stores in the shopping center the theater is located in now use it to advertise sales.
After the Forum 8 opened in 1992, the Campus began showing primarily art house movies. While it would show the occasional mainstream film (usually either grade-Z big studio stuff or a late in the run moveovers from the Cinema or Mall), it mostly served as Columbia’s first dedicated art house in 20 years. While I was a Mizzou student, I remember seeing such films as Trainspotting, Hamlet, Kids, Dead Man Walking, and Big Night there.
The Campus shut down in November 1998, the same weekend that the Stadium 14 opened. The space is now a ski shop. The center wall that divided the two auditoriums remains.
Commonwealth never controlled the Biscayne. It was a Dickinson Theater until it closed in 1998. The two theaters never ran the same movies, so they weren’t in direct competition, and since Columbia was fairly under screened between 1986 and 1992 (when the Forum 8 opened), there was plenty of product to go around.
The Biscayne (and the entire Biscayne Mall) had been going downhill for years, but what was the final nail in the coffin was Hollywood’s decision to turn the Mall into a dollar theater in 1998 (about six months after the Hollywood Stadium 14 opened). Since the two movies, for the first time, were playing the same movies, audiences naturally preferred the nicer, newer Mall to the rundown Biscayne.
Ironically, only a couple years later, the Mall 4 was evicted in order to make way for Columbia’s first Barnes & Noble, leaving the college town with no second-run theaters.
My grandparents live about 5 mintues away, so I drove by on Easter Sunday. At least for that day, the theater was being used as a banquet hall. There were tables set up in the well-perserved lobby. Even though the doors were wide open, I was running late, so I didn’t stop to go in.
I believe the theater was part of the Interstate circuit when it opened. I want to say it was originally a one-screen, before being twinned sometime in the late 70s.
The theater’s marquee on Kingsley is still there. Various stores in the shopping center the theater is located in now use it to advertise sales.
After the Forum 8 opened in 1992, the Campus began showing primarily art house movies. While it would show the occasional mainstream film (usually either grade-Z big studio stuff or a late in the run moveovers from the Cinema or Mall), it mostly served as Columbia’s first dedicated art house in 20 years. While I was a Mizzou student, I remember seeing such films as Trainspotting, Hamlet, Kids, Dead Man Walking, and Big Night there.
The Campus shut down in November 1998, the same weekend that the Stadium 14 opened. The space is now a ski shop. The center wall that divided the two auditoriums remains.
Commonwealth never controlled the Biscayne. It was a Dickinson Theater until it closed in 1998. The two theaters never ran the same movies, so they weren’t in direct competition, and since Columbia was fairly under screened between 1986 and 1992 (when the Forum 8 opened), there was plenty of product to go around.
The Biscayne (and the entire Biscayne Mall) had been going downhill for years, but what was the final nail in the coffin was Hollywood’s decision to turn the Mall into a dollar theater in 1998 (about six months after the Hollywood Stadium 14 opened). Since the two movies, for the first time, were playing the same movies, audiences naturally preferred the nicer, newer Mall to the rundown Biscayne.
Ironically, only a couple years later, the Mall 4 was evicted in order to make way for Columbia’s first Barnes & Noble, leaving the college town with no second-run theaters.
The Biscayne actually stayed a first-run theater until the summer of 1992, when it became a second-run a few weeks after Dickinson opened the Forum 8.