The Batavia City Council has approved variances for an addition onto the former Randall 15 movie theater to allow for the construction of a Super EMAX auditorium featuring a movie screen that will be 94 feet wide and 53 feet tall.

The 12,552-square-foot addition is part of a project by Michigan-based Emagine Entertainment Company to renovate the auditoriums, lobby and concession areas at the facility at 550 N. Randall Road, which has sat vacant for the past two years.

Under the plan, the overall number of auditoriums will be reduced from 15 to 12.

All auditoriums will be improved with reclining and heated seating, city officials said.

The Super EMAX auditorium itself will seat just under 400 people.

Batavia City Administrator Laura Newman said the City Council gave its final approval for the project during its July 5 meeting and that from here, “It’s full speed ahead.”

“We were approached by the Emagine group about a year ago,” Newman said. “We’re very excited as this (the Randall 15) was the only theater in town and we’d like to offer residents an entertainment option again. The Randall 15 was an extremely popular place for people to go and we’ve missed having a theater since 2020 when it closed. I think Emagine Entertainment is going to be tremendously successful once this is opened.”

Paul Glantz, 65, co-founder of Emagine Entertainment Co., said the firm has a number of theaters in the Midwest and currently operates one theater in Illinois and manages another in the state.

“We signed a lease with a real estate investment trust on Sept. 30 of 2020” for the Batavia site, he said.

“It’s taken a while to pull the plans together and the capital, but we think Batavia is going to be an outstanding market for us.”

The Super EMAX was first introduced in 2018 and to date, the Emagine group has installed two in Michigan. Slow market penetration, Glantz said, is due to “the substantial cost of them.”

“They’re very expensive to build — when you’re looking about buying 100-foot-long trusses to hold up the roof and so forth, there’s a lot of physical cost when you’re talking about building an enormous auditorium like that,” he said.

The cost of the buildout in Batavia, Glantz said, “will be in excess of $10 million.”

“This will be one of our highest-priced renovations,” he said.

To entice more visitors to the facility, Newman said, the “Emagine people have also shared a number of their concepts that you don’t find in a traditional movie theater” and that “those ideas will gain traction as well.”

Those concepts, Newman said, include party rooms with duckpin bowling as well as a bar set-up and a catering area along with a screen where “kids can watch a film or have pictures shown of the person being honored” at a party or other function.

“Emagine also has talked about a concept for sporting events or pay-per-view as well, making it more of an entertainment center,” she said.

Jeff Albertson, who serves as the building commissioner for Batavia, said the city is “happy to have the building be reused.”

“This is something that we’re in need of and the company (Emagine) is redoing a lot of the building,” Albertson said. “This will definitely be another amenity for the city.”

Despite the pandemic having forced people to shelter-in-place and find other movie-viewing options from streaming and subscription services, both Glantz and Newman are confident movie fans will want to leave their homes and return to the theaters.

“As far as people coming back to the theater, I think a similar thing was said about books,” Newman said. “Those were going to go away too because now we can get them in the digital format and we don’t have to go to a store and purchase this book.

But people are still buying them. It’s a different kind of marketplace but there are still folks that want to see a feature film like the new ‘Top Gun.’

To see it in a theater with a 94-foot diagonal screen would be an amazing experience compared to what it looks like on my living room TV.”

Glantz said in terms of luring movie fans back, “it is a different experience going out and watching the movies than watching something in your home.”

“The phone’s not ringing, the dog’s not barking and you’re not answering text messages — it’s just a different experience. And by the way, we clean up after you,” Glantz said.

As of now, both the city and Emagine say the new facility should open in the spring of 2023.

“We find them to be very realistic about their expectations as well as their ability to carry out those plans,” Newman said.

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.