The shuttered movie theater at 1000 Van Ness will be revived as a new theater early next year from a South Korean cinema company that specializes in "4D" experiences that include synchronized motion seats and live sensory effects like wind and rain.
The 14-screen cinema complex will be the third US outpost for Korea's CJ CGV, as Variety reports, after it opened two others in LA's Koreatown and Orange County's Buena Park.
At least one of the theaters in the multiplex will feature the Korean developed cinema technology known as 4DX, which enhances the on-screen experience with "environmental effects" including fog, lighting, wind, and rain, as well as moving seats synchronized with the on-screen action.
As the Hollywood Reporter explains, another theater will feature the "Cinerama-like ScreenX, a 270-degree, three-screen multi-projection system that uses a proprietary technique to expand select key scenes of feature films to the left- and right-side walls."
The AMC Van Ness 14 closed after 21 years in February, and it had seen better days. In addition to being located on a stretch of city street that has been under constant construction for something like three years — how long does it take to build a bus lane?!? — the theater suffered a spate of bed bugs that was widely reported on in 2017, but had perhaps been going on for six years by that point.
And now, as of early 2020, it shall return as a CJ-CGV multiplex screening big Hollywood blockbusters — and hopefully ones with lots of weather in them, like Twister.
But will they really be squirting patrons with rain? Won't that make the seats... gross?