Today marks the inception of a new IMAX theater in Orange County.
So, what better place is there to open Inception: The IMAX Experience.
Christopher Nolan's dreamy sci-fi thriller, which stars Leonardo Di Caprio, opens at 10:50 a.m. on the new IMAX screen at AMC 30 at The Block at
Orange.
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The addition of the IMAX gives one of Orange County's most patronized cinema centers a place to roll out epic blockbusters and movies
in 3D which, in case you haven't noticed, are coming out with much more
regularity these days.
It also fills a need in the north part of the county, which earlier in the summer lost its only IMAX theater with the shuttering of the CinemaFusion at Anaheim's GardenWalk mall near Disneyland.
The IMAX at Orange's outdoor shopping mall thus becomes Orange County's third, after those at Irvine Spectrum and Edwards Aliso Viejo.
The newest arrival will not force the Orange mall to change the name to the AMC 31, however. The IMAX was retrofitted into an existing theater.
Meanwhile,
changes are under way at the site of North County's former IMAX.
Financially troubled CinemaFusion is out at GardenWalk and San Diego-based UltraStar
Cinemas is in.
Known for operating luxury moviehouses, UltraStar is scheduled Thursday to
reopen the regular theaters at GardenWalk as well as the Sky Lobby 21+ theater that served alcohol and had patrons reclining in leather seats.
GardenWalk will be UltraStar's first Orange County locale. The company runs 13 moviehouses in Arizona and elsewhere in Southern California.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.