Vancouver’s Rio Theatre, team of filmmaker investors to take over Park Theatre

Good news for film fans in Vancouver: Cambie Village’s iconic Park Theatre, which closed its doors after a final showing Sunday, will reopen under new management.

When Cineplex, which has been operating the theatre since 2013, announced the closure, a team at Vancouver’s independent Rio Theatre reportedly got to work.

Spokespeople say the team approached a “group of passionate filmmakers and film professionals” to finance the project, including directors Sean Baker, Osgood Perkins, and Mike Flanagan, and Vancouver-born actor Finn Wolfhard.

Rio CEO Corinne Lea says the group shared her commitment to save the 84-year-old venue.

She says the project has been in the works for a few months, but parts of it have been moving fast.

“As soon as I learned that Cineplex would be taking out the projectors and a lot of the other infrastructure, then I realized we were going to need a lot more money than I had to do this project,” Lea told CityNews.

That’s when Vancouver-based producer and owner of Oddfellows Pictures and co-owner of Phobos, Chris Ferguson, got on board and quickly assembled the team of interested parties.

“That’s a crazy thing to do, but it also seemed like a crazy opportunity to miss. So I said, ‘Absolutely, let’s go raise some money and figure this out,’” Ferguson told CityNews.

“It’s a group of people who are just super passionate about bringing movies to theatres and promoting that.”

He says he raises money for movies for a living, and it’s normally a challenge.

“This is the easiest money-raising process I’ve ever had. I mean, there’s nobody I would call to ask about this who wouldn’t say, ‘Yes, absolutely. I don’t need to know the numbers. Let’s just go.’ So I just went through my list of the people who I know would be the most passionate about saving an independent movie theatre, and that’s who we ended up with,” said Ferguson.

Lea says a theatre should be a space made for everyone, and she’s especially excited to have 22-year-old Wolfhard involved.

“I always insist on having young people involved in our programming team because you really do need to have all the different generations of ideas to make it appealing for everyone in the public,” said Lea.

She says while Cineplex is great at programming multiplexes, the single-screen Park Theatre needs more “detailed attention” and creativity.

“We schedule sometimes five different things in a day at the Rio. We put a lot of passion and a lot of creativity into our ideas, so we will definitely be doing the same thing at the Park.”

Nothing has been scheduled yet, but Lea says the new Park will likely adopt a hybrid model of first-run and second-run showings to start. Unlike in recent years, the venue will not be limited to showing a single film for weeks on end.

Ferguson says it will be exactly what Vancouver needed.

“Vancouver is such a film city. You think of it as a film city. We make all the movies here, we make all the TV shows here, and I think we should be consuming movies at that high level too.”

He says it will be a boon to the neighbourhood, feeding into and feeding off the vibrant culture of Cambie Village.

Lea says the outgoing operator will be taking all its property from the theatre, but the Rio team is dedicated to replacing the 70 millimetre projector and also installing a “state-of-the-art laser projector” to enhance the cinematic experience.

“That’s kind of where the Rio and the Park will have a little bit different focus: With the Rio, we still want to be those crazy punk-rock kids, where we can just do all our fun drag shows and burlesque and Rocky Horror and all of that. And I think the Park will be a bit more focused on the cinematic quality. That’s not to say that the Park isn’t going to have fun too, and not to say that the Rio can’t give you a great cinematic experience, but that will be the split in character between the two.”

She says The Rio, her “first love,” isn’t going anywhere, while the Park could reopen as soon as December of this year.

Film fans, Lea says, can expect a big opening event and screening when it does.