The AMC 10, a University District moviehouse that a lot of us still called the Metro though that hadn’t been its name for a long time, closed its doors permanently at the end of last month. As losses go, this wasn’t a terrible one on its surface; the 10-plex theater, opened in 1988, wasn’t historic or particularly interesting, its parking situation was perpetually annoying, and many of its screens were small and had iffy sightlines. But as someone who remembers going there when it first opened, when its weirdly patterned carpet was brand-new and the idea of being able to walk to a theater that offered 10 — 10! — arthouse films at any given moment was absolutely intoxicating, I heard the news with sadness. The U District used to be a hub of moviegoing; now, with the closure, an era has officially ended. Please sweep up any spilled popcorn on your way out the door.
Let’s just quickly run through the roster of the missing. The Seven Gables, with its charmingly vintage lobby and weirdly ’70s screen mural, closed in 2017 (along with the Guild 45th, just across the freeway in Wallingford) and was gutted by fire on Christmas Eve 2020. Cinema Books, formerly around the corner, closed in 2015; it wasn’t a movie theater, but nonetheless a happy club for cinephiles. The Neptune, with its shiplike concession area, still stands, but was converted to a live entertainment venue in 2011. The cozy Grand Illusion recently lost its lease and has vacated its building on Northeast 50th Street; it’s in search of a new U District venue.
And now the AMC 10 makes its exit — a venue that was first the Metro Cinemas and after that, the Sundance Cinemas for a while in the 2010s (a delightful place where you could have the then-novel experience of drinking a cocktail with your movie). Of course, Scarecrow Video’s still in the neighborhood, and you’ll surely find something on its crowded shelves worth watching. But for those of us still in love with sitting in a theater in the dark, without interruptions, gazing at a big screen, all that’s left in the neighborhood is the historical Varsity, whose main cinema celebrates its 85th birthday this year.
It didn’t used to be this way. In the ’80s I was a University of Washington student, perpetually getting my head turned by movies I watched in the neighborhood: “The Thin Man,” quite possibly my favorite film of all time, at the Neptune, where I also remember a joyous run of Astaire/Rogers musicals; “A Room with a View” at the Seven Gables; “Amadeus” at the Guild 45th (where, if memory serves, it played approximately forever); “The Cotton Club” at the Varsity, where those stylish vintage sconces seemed to beautifully match the film’s deco style. I remember “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Neptune (let’s do the Time Warp again!), and sitting in the loveseat with my boyfriend at the Grand Illusion, where we saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” more than once.
It’s funny to think, though, that those rich years of movies weren’t even close to the U District’s cinematic heyday. A little over a century ago, the neighborhood boasted five silent moviehouses, with names like the Pleasant Hour Theatre and Ye College Play House (both of which were on University Way Northeast, then simply known as 14th Avenue Northeast). The Neptune, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2021, is the last of those remaining, after what was left of the University Theater on the north end of the Ave burned down in 2023. (The University was on the site of the Cowan Park Theater, which opened in 1915.)
In the shadows of those lost theaters, decades later, came something very modern: the Metro, which more than doubled the neighborhood’s screens and meant that those of us who loved moviegoing suddenly had a wealth of titles to consider. Many of the movies I sought out in those years came recommended by critic Pauline Kael, whom I’d faithfully read in The New Yorker — a subscription that was a college graduation gift from my dad. (Kael’s long gone, and my dad’s gone now too — time takes away more than movie theaters — but I still read the magazine weekly, remembering both of them with every issue.)
I had a ritual back then, in my little U District apartment: I’d read Kael’s review, go see the movie she wrote about, then hurry home to read the review again, wondering how it was possible that she saw so many things in just one viewing, and how she pulled off that remarkable trick of making me feel like I was watching the movie with her. I knew I loved “Moonstruck” — seen on a winter’s night at the Varsity, when the air felt so clear and cold and beautiful after leaving the film’s enchanted world — but I didn’t quite know how to express that it was, in Kael’s words, “an opera buffa in which the arias are the lines the characters deliver, in their harshly musical Brooklyn rhythms.”
Of course, movie-loving University of Washington students these days don’t need to go out to see “Moonstruck,” or any other title, like we did in the ’80s and ’90s, and that’s in large part why these once-magical spaces are gone. We stay home and stream, where it’s comfortable and there aren’t strangers sitting next to us texting at inappropriate moments. And for most of us that works just fine. I thought it worked fine for me, when I stayed home watching movies for 15 months during the pandemic — but when I finally saw a movie in a theater again, I suddenly remembered why I’d missed it: the bigness, the darkness, the place where I could lose myself and once again be that very young woman dazzled by movies. In a column I wrote in 2021, after that first screening back, I noted that there isn’t a practical justification for going out to the movies, “except that it’s wonderful, and maybe that’s enough.”
So even though I haven’t spent much time at the AMC 10 in recent years, I’m sorry to see it go. Magic used to be on so many U District corners; these days, it’s getting much harder to find.