Dolphin Cinemas
4555 E. Hastings Street,
Burnaby,
BC
V5C
4555 E. Hastings Street,
Burnaby,
BC
V5C
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Reopened under new management on August 3rd, 1990 after it closed in 1989. Grand opening ad posted.
This opened on December 31st, 1965. Grand opening ad in the photo section.
Status should now be listed as demolished. The current Google street view shows construction going on at the site of the old Dolphin.
The Park theatre is STILL open. It’s a Cineplex cinema now…the Dunbar is still operational as well.
Park theater is gone; not sure if Dunbar is still in operation.
I remember when the Dolphin opened, was an Odeon then. Too bad, another one bites the dust. Amazing it lasted this long. Hopefully the Dunbar and Park will last several more years. Too bad the Ridge is gone. Saw The Sound of Music there when I was 14
The Dolphin Cinema will be closing next week. Article:
http://www.burnabynewsleader.com/news/260149481.html#.U31ShezAQvU.facebook
I read that this theatre is slated to close any time now.
There has been an explosion of re-development in this area of town and this property is to be demolished and turned into mixed condo/retail.
Weekend Matinees start times show they have only two screens.
Chuck1231: The Dolphin has been a twin cinema for as long as I can remember. The operators at times may stagger different first-run movies at different times on the same screen, hence the confusion. The Triple cinema concept at one time was very short lived – about 3 months when an Independent ran the theatre.
Also, I really wanted to visit the Lougheed Triple (closed in 2000, I think?) and from what I could tell they were three huge cinemas, especially #1 which seated nearly 800 people.
Hey Sean,
I apologize for the error in my last posting. I just find it REALLY strange. On my visit there in 2008, I could not find any evidence that a third screen was ever there. Perhaps it was added to another section of the building but was not permitted to for one reason or another? Very, very odd.
Curious how this cinema is doing now, and if they put in new seats as they had promised. It really was a dive the last time I visited.
Jason: I’m very well aware of the Lougheed Mall triple theatre. The Lougheed Mall was originally opened by Famous Players and has always been a triple cinema. Before the Dolphin was operated by ATNY, it was briefly run by independents and they had added a third screen. How they did it, I’m uncertain as I never attended the cinema during this short lived venture. After sitting dark, ATNY reopened it as a twin.
Photos of the Dolphin Cinema appeared in the February 20, 1967, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The theater was designed by architect J. Douglas Henderson.
The June 20, 1966, issue of Boxoffice names the original owners of the Dolphin as Muzzocco and Gervanni, and said that the house would reopen under Odeon management on June 23. This issue gave the seating capacity as 775, but the 1967 item said 750.
Sean may have been getting this confused with the former Lougheed Mall three-plex, which had a large screen in the 700-seat region. This was also a cinema run by the small “A Theater Near You” chain.
Here are a set of photos I took while visiting in December. Just thinking of that center aisle, horrible common width screen and mono sound just gives me a headache. New seats are being installed in early December, and hopefully this is the start of many improvements.
It certainly is a twin. Sean’s post and Mike Rivest’s movie-theatre.org make mention a third screen was added, but there’s no visual evidence in this dump there ever was a third screen.
Has this cinema ever had a third screen? I visited this cinema for the first time this September and there was no evidence a third screen ever existed here (and if it went up in 1995, it would certainly still be here). This is a twin cinema through and through.
There IS evidence of obvious twinning, as both cinemas are long and narrow, with the dredded centre aisle, broken seats and a small common-width 1.85 screen. Both screens are still mono. I submitted photos to Cinematour and I hope they’ll go up soon.
As of right now, this place is a dump even though I was told the lobby was just renovated. New seating will be put in place this December (interestingly enough, #1 has just ONE of these new seats right in the back next to the wheelchair spot) and I hope they centre all the seats with an aisle around instead of right down the middle.
The Dolphin opened as an independent theatre in Dec. 1965 with a double feature of McLintock and Lilies of the Field. It joined the Odeon theatre chain a few months later with ‘Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number’. As a single house it had a large barn-like auditorium with bright red upholstered seats and was quite popular in the neighbourhood. After greedy Cinebux Odious twinned it in the 80s though,(badly)it became increasingly dumpier. As of this posting, it’s still open after a closure of several months
Opened in 1966, it was twinned in 1982. A third screen was added in 1995. First owned and operated by Odeon theaters, it initially had a seating capacity of 778 seats.