In what appears to be another casualty of the pandemic-fuelled shift away from movie theatres to at-home streaming services, Landmark Cinemas has announced it will close the doors on its Gateway Park Drive location in Kitchener by the end of the week.
The last showing will be Thursday, Oct. 5, according to a post on the theatre's website.
"ATTENTION MOVIE LOVERS: Please be advised we are closing our Kitchener theatre. The last play date is Thursday, October 5th. Thank you for your support of this theatre."
The theatre chain asks customers to consider heading to its Waterloo location where recent renovations added "luxury recliner seating, its market exclusive Premiere Seats," and Laser Ultra, Landmark's proprietary Premium Large Format (PLF) movie-going experience."
Landmark's Kitchener location is the only local theatre to offer IMAX, a high-resolution film and large screen projection format that was developed in and around the Cambridge area in the late 1960s by a group of local inventors and businessmen, including the man who would become the city's second mayor, Robert Kerr.
Kerr's contribution to IMAX is memorialized on a plaque in Mill Race Park, which is another project he was integral to.
The company's co-founders were Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, and William C. Shaw.
According to The Birth of IMAX by Diane Disse, they developed the first IMAX cinema projection standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada.
Several filmmakers, including James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, have embraced the format in recent years.
