A movie theater will be absent from the Hudson Valley Mall for the next four months or so, but the shows will go on again in January 2019, mall owners Hull Property Group said this week.
Longtime tenant Regal Cinemas 12 shut down its operation at the troubled town of Ulster mall last week, leaving Kingstonians looking to take in a picture the prospects of driving to a nearby town, or just staying in and streaming something from the Internet.
Last week, Hull announced that NCG Cinema has signed on as a mall tenant and will start renovations of the ex-Regal Cinemas space next month. Opening is expected in January.
According to the Hull press release, “All 12 auditoriums will feature luxury recliner chairs and assigned seating in addition to state-of-the-art sound and projection systems.” This will be the Michigan-based company’s first foray into New York State; besides the Mitten State, the 147-screen chain operates theaters in Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, both North and South Carolina, and Georgia.
Peter Lawrence, owner of the Orpheum in Saugerties, said he didn’t really notice an uptick in attendance last weekend after Regal’s abdication, saying that how many people go to the movies on any given evening “depends on the pictures that you’re playing.”
While Regal’s closure was greeted on social media by many comments bemoaning the mall’s ongoing woes and predicting its final transition from going concern into a “ghost mall,” Lawrence said Regal was recently sold to a British company and that company, he’d heard, had plans to shut down some 500 of Regal’s 7,307 screens in 564 theaters.
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