An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

From to­day, Cen­tral res­i­dents can once again en­joy block­buster movies at the Cine­plex from Cin­e­maOne, at Price Plaza.

Movi­eTowne moved out of Price Plaza in Oc­to­ber 2020 dur­ing the height of the pan­dem­ic, af­ter be­ing at the lo­ca­tion for ten years.

En­deav­our Hold­ings Ltd (EHL) which owns Price Plaza, part­nered with Cin­e­maOne Ltd (CINE1), to con­struct the Cine­Cen­tral mul­ti­plex last Oc­to­ber.

Cin­e­maOne Ltd op­er­ates IMAX, Gem­stone, and 4DX the­atres at One Wood­brook Place, and Gem­stone Cin­e­mas at Gulf City Mall, San Fer­nan­do.

On Wednes­day, Price Plaza placed a teas­er on its Face­book page say­ing, “Lights cam­era, ac­tion. Cine­Cen­tral, the ul­ti­mate cin­e­ma ex­pe­ri­ence, opens on Fri­day at Price Plaza.”

The Cine­plex will be lo­cat­ed in the north-east­ern block quad­rant of the plaza.

Cin­e­maOne’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer In­grid Jahra told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, that Cine­Cen­tral, a sub­sidiary of Cin­e­maOne, is ex­cit­ed to ser­vice Ch­agua­nas and its en­vi­rons with its lat­est movie ex­pe­ri­ence.  

“We are elat­ed to have reached the point of re­open­ing the cin­e­ma in col­lab­o­ra­tion with En­deav­our Hold­ings, our fel­low pub­licly-list­ed SME, Re­pub­lic Bank, our dili­gent con­trac­tor teams, and even the for­mer op­er­a­tor Movi­eTowne.”

Jahra said the fi­nanc­ing of $15 mil­lion took about nine months to con­sum­mate giv­en the ad­verse COVID-19 im­pact on the busi­ness and the gen­er­al en­ter­tain­ment sec­tor. How­ev­er, she said it is the com­pa­ny’s most ex­pe­di­tious out­fit­ting process.

She al­so in­di­cat­ed that 40 peo­ple thus far have been able to se­cure jobs at the Cine­plex.

At a me­dia con­fer­ence last year to an­nounce the move, Jahra ex­plained that the pan­dem­ic pro­vid­ed the op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­ter the Ch­agua­nas mar­ket, which his­tor­i­cal­ly has been the sec­ond high­est in na­tion­al box of­fice re­ceipts be­hind Port of Spain.

“Ch­agua­nas, in the past, en­joyed al­most 20 per cent of the box of­fice re­ceipts since the in­tro­duc­tion of the cine­plex for­mat near­ly 20 years ago. As we con­tin­ue to ex­pand our Cin­e­maOne brand in ma­jor lo­cal mar­kets, we couldn’t be more thrilled to share our ver­sion of the movie with the lo­cal Ch­agua­nas com­mu­ni­ty,” she said.

Jahra not­ed that Cin­e­maOne and En­deav­our Hold­ings are the first and sec­ond en­ti­ties to be list­ed on the SME tier of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change and are now col­lab­o­rat­ing to reignite movie-go­ing in the rapid­ly ex­pand­ing and vi­brant city of Ch­agua­nas.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia in Au­gust, Movi­eTowne own­er, Derek Chin, said even though the cin­e­ma had to give up the space dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, that does not mean that the Ch­agua­nas area can­not be re­vis­it­ed by the com­pa­ny.