Cinema 3 at Yard Birds

Joe Vogel on May 9, 2022 at 9:33 pm

Ken Layton’s capsule history of this house at CinemaTour says that it was built by Ralph Peel in 1982, the operation was taken over by Luxury Theatres around 1986, it was acquired by Act III Theatres in 1991, and then Regal Cinemas bought the Act III chain in 1998 and operated the house for about four years. In 2002 local resident Daryl Lund, owner of the downtown Chehalis Cinema, took over and made many improvements, including installing stadium seating. Lund closed it in March, 2009, but it was then reopened by independent operators Scott White and Jeff Frias.

Layton’s history ends there, but an article in the Chehalis Daily Chronicle of December 30, 2009 said that the house had closed again after a six month attempt to draw customers by showing English language movies with Spanish subtitles. I’ve found no later information about the place, so that closure might have been final. The Midway Cinema had opened on October 10, 2008

The name of this house was Cinema 3, and the Yard Birds shopping center was its location. All the newspaper references I’ve found to it call it Cinema 3 in Yard Birds or at Yard Birds or, after Regal took over, Regal Cinema 3. The newspaper was still referring to it as the Regal Cinema 3 after Lund took over, so it might be that Regal still owned the master lease and Lund was operating with a sublease.