This Las Vegas cineplex was a pandemic casualty. A new vision is emerging
A Las Vegas movie theater that closed a few years ago is slated to be turned into retail space for a mix of new tenants.
Bill Bayne, whose family owns the Village Square retail plaza on Sahara Avenue at Fort Apache Road, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he plans to gut the shuttered 18-screen Regal cineplex there and is treating each theater room as a separate retail suite.
He said he has been working to bring in such tenants as a barbecue restaurant, a gymnastics studio and a rock-climbing gym.
The former theater’s main entrance faces south toward Village Square’s sprawling main parking lot, and the screening rooms stretch behind adjacent shops. However, Bayne said he plans to open the north side of the cineplex building as part of the redevelopment.
He is waiting on permits for heavy construction work, but for now, crews can undertake some interior work, including removing theater seats and taking signs off the walls, he noted.
Blockbusters and indies
The Regal theater at Village Square was known for its regular blockbuster showings, though it also featured small-release and foreign films, making it the closest thing Las Vegas had to an indie film house for a long time.
It filled a niche with semiregular Filipino film screenings that drew full crowds, as well as Bollywood movies and special rereleases.
But after the pandemic wreaked havoc on the movie theater industry, the cinema chain’s parent company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022.
The company unveiled plans in a court filing in early 2023 to close dozens of theaters, including the one at Village Square.
Weeks after the theater closed, Las Vegas’ first true art house cinema opened with downtown’s Beverly Theater.
As Bayne described it, there were several plans for the movie theater building in Village Square that came and went, including a train museum, apartments and a Jewish community center. At one point, he was in talks with a company that wanted to screen movies there, but that also fell through.
Apartment plans nixed
As seen in Las Vegas city records, a local real estate professional drew up plans to demolish the theater and develop a 252-unit apartment complex.
City staff wrote in a report this past spring that the proposal would “reactivate a stagnant” anchor site in the plaza.
Bayne, however, said several tenants in Village Square opposed the idea of having apartments there.
The landlord had figured the store owners would be thrilled to have hundreds of potential customers living on-site. But they were “pretty negative about it,” he said, noting they were worried, in part, that the residents would soak up a lot of the parking.
Bayne said that he wants to have a good relationship with his tenants, adding his family makes money from their rent payments, and that the apartment plans were scrapped.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Review-Journal Deputy Neon Editor Kristen DeSilva contributed to this report.
