Rendering Curbcut
Feb. 18, 2020 By Michael Dorgan
The long-awaited movie theater planned for Queens Boulevard is about to get bigger.
The developers of a 12-story mixed use building slated to go up at 38-01 Queens Blvd. said that the building will contain 10 Regal Cinema movie screens instead of earlier plans that would have contained eight.
Construction on the project, to be called The Sunnyside, was halted in August, when the Department of Buildings issued a partial stop-work order requesting updated drawings for the proposed change.
The development will contain four floors of dedicated theater space, with the upper floors for healthcare facilities and office space, according to Aaron Malinsky of Curbcut Urban Partners, who is developing the property with Platinum Realty and RW Real Estate Group.
Malinsky said they are in the process of completing fully revised plans and aim to present them to DOB in the spring. Construction is expected to take 24 months to complete once approved.
“We had to redesign the entire building to accommodate Regal’s request but we used the intervening time period to complete the environmental cleanup work and a lot of the utility work,” he said.
The original plans will largely remain the same, except some reconfiguration is needed to expand the cinema area to 35,000 feet, he added.
The theater will be upgraded with new specialized seats and sound systems and will include a Regal Premium Experience (RPX) auditorium, which presents movies in powerful, uncompressed surround sound and bright images in a custom-built premium environment, Malinsky said.
The new cinema will provide the neighborhood with its first theater since the shuttering of Sunnyside Center Cinemas in 2015, which opened in the late 1940s. Currently, the closest theater is the Regal UA Kaufman Astoria, located at 35-30 38th Street.
“Regal is creating a masterpiece of a movie theater,” Malinsky said.
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