By Jackie Shannon
After recent announcements that it will be tossing up two new cinema complexes in Sydney’s Chippendale and Double Bay (as well as doing a major refurb on its site in Byron Bay), cinema chain, Palace Cinemas, has just confirmed another multiplex, this time in Melbourne. Palace will open a new fifteen-screen cinema as part of the upcoming cultural transformation of the notorious Pentridge Prison site (where Mark “Chopper” Read famously bashed many of his fellow convicts into submission), the company has announced.
Temporarily named Palace Champ Street (for the street on which it will be located), and part of a boutique shopping precinct, the cinema will feature an environmentally sustainable design. Bang in the middle of Melbourne’s sprawling just-outside-the-city hipsteropolis, the new cinema complex is set to please the right-on set just as much as the solar-powered Palace Westgarth in Northcote. “Our vision for Palace Champ Street is to create a warm, vibrant, film, arts, and hospitality hub, which will unite cinema lovers of all ages and cultural backgrounds,” says Palace Cinemas’ CEO Benjamin Zeccola.
Palace has announced that it will bring its popular selection of travelling film festivals to the new cinema, as well as a host of special events. Hopefully, all of these new screens in Sydney and Melbourne might offer a home for the not-inconsiderable number of independent and Australian films that currently find it so difficult to get a foothold in local cinemas. Just sayin’…