UWS Metro Theater Gets a New Name: Goal to Reopen in 2028
A rendering of the new Uptown Film Center. Renderings courtesy of Uptown Cinema Center.
By Noëlle de Leeuw
The Metro Theater name is no more. The nonprofit that will run the renewed art deco movie house on Broadway, between West 99th and 100th streets, revealed its new name at a Monday night event: the Uptown Film Center. It marks the beginning of a new chapter for the theater, formerly known as the Metro, the Midtown, and a handful of other names over the years.
“You never know how something’s going to go over,” said Ira Deutchman, president of the Upper West Side Cinema Center, the nonprofit that bought the building earlier this year, in a Zoom interview with West Side Rag. “Especially, given the fact that people in the neighborhood were so nostalgic about calling it the Metro all of the time.”
The new Uptown Film Center will have five movie screens, an educational center, and a cafe. The nonprofit hopes to break ground on construction in early 2027. If all goes according to plan, the film center would open to the public in 2028.
One of the five theaters within the new arts film center will hold around 185 seats, while another plans for 150, and the additional three are expected to each seat around 45 people.
Uptown Film Center will operate with a commitment to showing arthouse cinema, and not just Hollywood blockbusters.
“Nowadays, there’s a million choices. Why would somebody go to a movie theater?” Deutchman told the Rag. “It’s because we’re presenting something that’s different; that you can’t get on your tube at home or on your phone. It’s about the experience of going to see things that are a little bit outside of the mainstream.”
The Uptown Film Center has launched a $29 million capital campaign to build the theater. It hopes to have raised $5 million by the end of the year, which they’re currently around halfway to reaching, according to the group’s leadership.
The theater opened in 1933 as the Midtown Theater and has lived many lives since. In the 1970s it operated as an adult movie house, before becoming an arthouse cinema in the 1980s. The art deco landmark theater eventually closed its doors in 2005 and has been shuttered ever since. The interior was demolished a year later.
New leadership clarified that while the name would be changing, it planned to keep the pink terra-cotta facade at the front of the theater.
