San Francisco's newest movie theater is opening this week. Here's how to get tickets
Tickets are now on sale for showtimes beginning Thursday, July 10, at Apple Cinemas Van Ness. The soft opening for the 14-screen venue, which Apple Cinemas Director of Operations Jessica Robitaille confirmed in an email to the Chronicle, includes ' Superman.' The latest DC film from James Gunn is projected to be the top movie in North America on its opening weekend.
Also screening are holdover films ' F1: The Movie,' ' 28 Years Later,' ' How to Train Your Dragon,' ' Lilo & Stitch,' ' Materialists,' ' M3gan 2.0,' Pixar's ' Elio ' and 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' currently No. 1 at the box office.
This will mark the first time the smell of popcorn will fill the 92,724-square-foot space in the 1921 Don Lee Building since it was vacated by CGV Cinemas more than two years ago. Originally built as an auto dealership, the building was converted into a cinema and retail space by AMC Theatres in 1998. The theater closed in 2019 before the South Korean-owned CGV Cinemas renovated and operated it from September 2021 to February 2023.
Apple Cinemas, a small East Coast-based chain that opened its first theater in 2013, signed a lease with the building's owners, a partnership called 1000 Van Ness LP, in June. Robitaille told the Chronicle at the time that the movie theater will be state of the art, including one IMAX screen and, eventually, San Francisco's first LED screen.
'I think San Francisco opens up a lot of opportunities,' said Robitaille, who noted the building's historic architecture. 'I think it's really a fantastic space that we have to work with and we have big plans for it.'
Apple Cinemas co-founder Siva Shan told the Chronicle last month that 'Every Apple Cinema is a luxury movie theater,' and that the company's plans include adding a restaurant and bar, as well as recliner seats.
'The location and the (Van Ness) neighborhood is both a residential area as well as a commercial area, and we are very confident people will (embrace) us,' Shan said.
The Van Ness theater is Apple's 14th venture and first outside of the Northeastern United States. The company has also signed a lease to take over the former Century Blackhawk Plaza in Danville, which should reopen by the end of the year.
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Los Angeles Times
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And so perfect was the full origin and creation tale in Nolan's first of the films that it remains the best Batman origin story ever told, in any medium, so much so that for me and many fans it's the definitive conception of Bruce Wayne's loss, choices, training, and superhero first outings. It's so good, nobody else wants to try to do it again, because how do you match that? One of the things that makes Batman Begins so definitive a depiction of Batman's origin is that this film, like its sequel The Dark Knight, depicted Gotham City as a living breathing character in the story. The city's arc defined much of the story's development and the main characters' own arcs, in deeply rich ways that connected those threads at every opportunity while making it seem effortless. For what it's worth, this is where I think some of the (relative) decreased praise for The Dark Knight Rises over the years is significantly rooted in the fact its depiction of Gotham is more centered around specific groups and created a negative sense of the population as a whole, depicted mostly by the angry masses who rise up to take advantage of Bane's rule, leaving the cops and government officials along with some wealthy board members to represent the side of Gotham worth saving from the League of Shadows' wrath. The same sense of the whole city and why it's always fighting its way toward the light even in the darkest of times felt lost thematically in The Dark Knight Rises, except in a few instances where necessary to reflect Bruce's lost sense of purpose, and there was no sense of how a resolution between the varying factions would come about, nor what the city as a whole learned or wanted to learn from all of this. 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Batman Begins, though, is still so great and aging like fine wine that my mental canon is to treat The Batman as a rough sort of continuation of the first two Nolan movies (so Rises is off in some distant future) with Begins as his origin story. I know this will eventually run into continuity issues my mind can't resolve simply, but that's no different than the case with the decades of best stories in the comics. I still believe Batman Begins is one of Christopher Nolan's best films (Dunkirk is his best, and among the finest war films ever made), an effortless blockbuster effort from an emerging filmmaker who brought a commitment and vision – along with David Goyer – similar to the efforts around Donner's Superman. Nolan created an epic, operatic myth. The inspiration from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was also exactly right. Nolan's own noir cinematic sensibilities, in close proximity to his then-recent trio of neo-noir releases (Following in 1998, Memento in 2000, and Insomnia in 2002) were like preparation for his destiny to turn Batman back into a cinematic icon. Batman vs Superman: Who Wears It Better? Batman Begins smartly looked back to the lessons established in Richard Donner's seminal 1978 blockbuster Superman, which established the superhero movie template so perfectly that it's still the most successful approach and widely used today. Marvel Studios' MCU is premised on learning the lessons of Donner's Superman and applying them to great effect. But as I already mentioned, prior to 2005 the only really successful superhero franchises still in theaters were Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. By that time, both Batman and Superman franchises had gone off the rails and remained dormant. Only X-Men utilized the template of Donner's Superman. Batman Begins not only revived the Caped Crusader's theatrical fortunes, but also reminded Hollywood that their biggest tentpoles and IP could be revived by returning to their roots. For DC, as the ones who established the superhero genre and the template for adapting comics to film, it was natural and good to rediscover their own lightning-in-a-bottle success. It also infused superhero cinema with artistic legitimacy and seriousness in a broader way than X-Men had been able to accomplish up to that point. The lesson landed, and it influenced Iron Man three years later, which gave birth to the MCU. The same year, The Dark Knight became the first superhero movie to top $1 billion, making Batman Begins look even more brilliant in hindsight. Batman Begins had precisely that recipe, and applied it as masterfully as Superman did back in 1978. With DC Studios' Superman once more attempting a return to the template including tonally and visually, not to mention so much overlap of musical score and iconic elements like the Fortress of Solitude and certain thematic and story beats, and now with blockbuster box office numbers alongside critical and audience praise, it looks like Gunn's reboot will take its place alongside Batman Begins for reviving and perfecting a franchise by returning to superhero cinema's roots. Of course, it's not enough to merely apply the moving parts and stylings of the Superman template. You must have a terrific story to tell and heroes the audience relates to, or the rest won't matter. But when you've got that story and that hero, the sky's the limit. Just as Batman Begins applied the right lessons the right way 20 years ago, I think Superman will fly high.
