Latest news with #multiplex
Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Five reasons why you might want to see the Smurfs movie this summer
Below are five reasons why you might want to see Smurfs over the summer holidays. 1) You're fed up with your kids. They're annoying. They're out of control. They need to be punished. The multiplex has the answer, courtesy of this formless branded mind-numbing head-wrecker. It's a garish animation that celebrates everyone's favourite yet entirely interchangeable blue-skinned Belgian berks in a fifth movie outing from Hollywood. This one is notable only for featuring and foregrounding a multi-jobbing Rihanna as Smurfette and also the producer and creator of the film's ear-scrapingly generic Smurf anthem, Friend of Mine. Sample lyric over malfunctioning drum machine? 'Feel like a friend of mine, feel like a friend of mine, like a friend of mine, feel like a friend of mine.'
BBC News
09-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Milton Keynes cinema The Point to be demolished for new flats
The UK's first multiplex cinema will be demolished after developers won an appeal to proceed with previously rejected plans to build flats on the opened in Milton Keynes in 1985, The Point was closed after showing its last film in glass pyramid structure, which was once the tallest building in the city, with 487 flats across four buildings up to 21 storeys following a planning appeal, inspector Paul Griffiths ruled the proposal can go ahead, including the recladding of an existing multi-storey car park, a bar, sports facilities, and a new cinema on the roof. The council had listed seven reasons for refusal, but discussions before and during the inquiry reduced that number to of the complaints was that the building did not deliver an acceptable level of affordable housing, but the claimant agreed to pay £690,009 towards the provision of affordable housing elsewhere in Milton two remaining concerns were related to The Point's status as a non-designated heritage asset and the potential effect on the nearby Grade II listed shopping the inspector noted the old cinema had "a special place in the memory of the people of Milton Keynes", he concluded it "has clearly outlived its purpose, and there are no realistic prospects for its effective re-use."The inspector ruled any impact on the shopping centre would be minimal. Discussions took place during the inquiry about how to include a "nod or reference back" to The Point in the new development. The inspector's view was that retaining physical parts of the existing building would be "all too predictable and indeed tokenistic".Instead, he preferred a more "subtle and considered response", such as adding red lighting to the top of the buildings to evoke memories of The a statement, Galliard Homes said it was delighted with the appeal continued: "Our plans will transform this prominent site, which has been vacant for nearly 20 years, into a dynamic mixed-use destination."At the heart of the proposals is a commitment to celebrating the legacy of The Point."Milton Keynes Council has been approached for comment. Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Globe and Mail
05-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Toronto wrangles with a simple question: What is a multiplex?
Brendan Charters runs a 15-year-old design-build firm, Eurodale Developments, which specializes in custom homes. He is diversifying, like a growing number of Greater Toronto Area home-building firms, into multiplexes due both to demand and planning reforms intended to enable more missing middle-type housing. – But, like many contractors who have dipped their toes into this new (but actually old) market, he's come face-to-face with a slippery question: What, exactly, is a multiplex? According to the City of Toronto, a multiplex built in neighbourhoods zoned for low-rise residential can have up to four units. Council's planning and housing committee next week [June 12] will begin considering whether to stretch that definition, so multiplexes can have up to six units, with apartment buildings re-defined as anything with seven or more. However, as Mr. Charters and others – including city planning officials – have discovered, such calculations are anything but straightforward. Take the example of two semi-detached houses that could each become fourplexes. 'We're actually building one or two of these now,' he says. 'We slipped in before the City of Toronto started to say, 'Wait a second, these are duplexes. We can't fourplex them because they're semi-detached duplexes.'' In other cases, city planning examiners have deemed that such conjoined projects are actually small apartment buildings, which council has voted to allow in areas such as major streets but nonetheless run into opposition from neighbours and committees of adjustment. To confront these ambiguities, city planning staff will also propose additional categories – e.g., 'detached houseplexes' or 'semi-detached houseplexes' – to capture anomalies in the original multiplex bylaw, based on in-depth analysis they carried out on the first 222 multiplex applications submitted for approval (as of last summer). Yet another twist in this definitional maze focuses on the number of bedrooms in a given unit within a multiplex. At the same committee meeting, councillors will get their first look at a staff proposal to cap the number of bedrooms in a multiplex – a move that has left Mr. Charters wondering whether the city genuinely wants to enable more family-sized rental housing at smaller scales, per council's various missing-middle policies. 'When the planning department rolled this out to us as an industry, I said, 'What's the number?' They said there's a mathematical formula that's being devised. But I was also told one of our projects, that has a four-bedroom unit and two two-bedroom units, would be fine. The fear is that [such projects] would contravene the rooming house bylaw.' The city's attempt to regulate the number of bedrooms touches some tricky planning questions. While council has been pushing the development industry for almost two decades to build more two- and three-bedroom apartments in order to allow families with children to live in high-rises, the market reality is that condos of that size tend to be very expensive and difficult for young families to afford. What's more, demand for apartments with several bedrooms includes older people who are downsizing as well as students or unrelated adults who need to share larger apartments in order to afford rent. Yet when planning officials analyzed the first 222 multiplex proposals, they noticed a handful where each unit had six to nine bedrooms, which suggested that the builders weren't thinking about families. In effect, a single multiplex with four such apartments might have up to 20 to 30 bedrooms in total, making it for all intents and purposes a rooming house. The planning department's solution will be to impose a limit on the total number of bedrooms in a given multiplex, but allow the builder to decide how to distribute them among the units. Mr. Charters says he understands the city's desire to avoid inadvertently the development of rooming houses when there's already a formal process for licensing them. But, he adds, the bedroom cap 'is confusing for the marketplace. It creates another wrinkle of unpredictability for us.' The city's efforts to remove other obstacles to multiplex applications has also included a review of what happens with these kinds of proposals when they go to committees of adjustment. Since council began adopting more permissive zoning regulations in areas long set aside for detached houses, the committees have turned back missing-middle type projects, even if they generally conformed with council's goal of promoting 'gentle density.' With multiplex projects that have to pass muster with the committee of adjustment, city planners will now be expected to submit their professional opinions to help the members understand how such proposals fit within council's broader policy aims. Yet the roadblocks include perverse incentives created not by the planning bylaws but rather by development charges and the financial incentives council has adopted to encourage such projects. Development charges, which can run to tens of thousands of dollars, are waived for multiplexes, and deferred for garden suites and laneway houses. Some builders have sought to maximize the density on a lot by applying to build a four-unit multiplex with a garden suite in the back. But, according to architect Craig Race, whose firm, Lanescape, specializes in such projects, contractors who want to build both simultaneously can find themselves on the receiving end of large development charge fees. 'You're allowed to do both as of right in the zoning by law,' he says. 'But the way staff are choosing to interpret the development charge bylaw, they're forcing you to build them out of sequence.' In other words, the contractor must first build the multiplex, and can only then begin with the garden or laneway suite, even though it makes sense, logistically and financially, to do both at the same time. As Mr. Race says, 'It's extremely inefficient.' One small contractor, who asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing an approval, found himself facing $400,000 in development charges because he'd tried to do both at once, thereby triggering levies on all five units – a financial burden that has made the project difficult to justify commercially. Mr. Race adds that there's a lack of consistency in how city officials deal with this problem. 'Some staff have been trained to watch out for that. Others have not.'
