KENTWOOD, Mich. (WOOD) — Phoenix Theatres will be taking over the theater space at Woodland Mall.
The movie theatre company will invest $4 million to refurbish the space Celebration Cinema used to be in, Phoenix Theatres and Woodland Mall owner PREIT announced during a press conference Tuesday.
“We sat back and we looked at (Woodland Mall) and said, ‘This is the perfect place for a state-of-the-art movie theater to be located with all these wonderful amenities.’ This is a fantastic building with great bones,” Cory Jacobson, the owner of Michigan-based Phoenix Theatres, said. “We are basically going to start from scratch and re-envision this and hopefully give the community something that’s really special.”
The company has plans to refurbish the theater to include heated and reclining love-seat style chairs in each of the 14 auditoriums.
It will be equipping the auditoriums with Dolby Atmos, the company said, for an immersive audio experience.
The Woodland Mall movie theater will be the sixth for the 21-year-old independently owned company and the fourth in Michigan.
The grand opening will be later this fall.
The heated, reclining chairs Phoenix Theatres will put in all of the auditoriums in Woodland Mall. (July 27, 2021) A rendering of the new Phoenix Theatres. (July 27, 2021) The Phoenix Theatres logo. (July 27, 2021)
The Woodland Mall theater shut down in May 2020 when Celebration Cinema announced it would not be renewing its lease. A spokesperson for Studio C, Celebration Cinema’s parent company, said while pandemic restrictions sped up the process, the Woodland Mall theater was expensive to lease and operated at a loss for much of its 13 years in business.
Celebration Cinema took over the theater from Cinemark, which also struggled to remain viable at the mall.