Screenland Crown Center opens Christmas Day

Movies are coming back to the third level of Crown Center Shops.

Screenland owner Butch Rigby

is taking his brand of exhibition (good movies! beer!) into two

auditoriums that went dark when Crown Center closed its six-screen

cinema a few years ago. Screenland Crown Center opens Christmas Day with The Road and Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles. (Wes Anderson’s animated fable may also be showing, but Rigby can’t advertise it for reasons that are clear only to the Budweiser swim trunks Bill Murray wore in Rushmore.)

Screenland will share a lobby and a concessions counter with Off Center Theatre, a 243-seat live-performance space Crown Center created when it knocked down the walls between the other four auditoriums.

Lucky for Rigby, the auditoriums left intact were in good physical condition. Crown Center had installed new carpet and seats not long before it decided to get out the movie business. The rooms needed a good cleaning, not a complete remodel. The path to the auditoriums is lined with old posters obtained from the National Screen Service.