Comments about Varsity Theatre in Vancouver, CA

MSC77 on May 29, 2023 at 6:05 pm

KevinEastwood and rl_83: Vancouver’s 70mm history is chronicled here.

rl_83 on May 28, 2023 at 9:18 pm

Hi Kevin,

That post about Hamlet above was from 2012, long before H8.

That’s an interesting bit of info about moving projectors, I worked for Festival Cinemas for a while and never heard about that.

What was going on at the Park when they moved the projector over? Why didn’t they just play it at The Park?

KevinEastwood on March 24, 2023 at 12:59 am

I see that a previous post states that The Varsity ran the last 70mm print in Vancouver and says that this was Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in 1997. That is not true. The Park Theatre in Vancouver has played 70mm prints of films like The Hateful 8 (2015) and Dunkirk (2017) in the years since. In fact, when The Varsity Theatre played Hamlet in 1997 it actually borrowed The Park Theatre’s Cinemeccanica projector to show the film. At the time both theatres were operated by the same company, Festival Cinemas. I still remember the sight of the print for Hamlet since it was the wildest print I had ever seen working in movie theatres. Due to the fact the film was over 3 hours long, the movie had to be split across 14 reels, resulting in 14 massive 70 mm shipping cases that lined the hallway to the projection booth. - A former manager of the Varsity & Park