Rohnert Park’s Reading Cinemas closes after 25 years

Rohnert Park’s movie theater Reading Cinemas has quietly closed after 25 years.

The multiscreen theater announced the Rohnert Park Expressway location’s closing via signs taped to the windows Wednesday afternoon.

Santa Rosa resident Katie Davis stood in front of one of those signs with her jaw dropped. She’d been going to the movies there for the past 20 years.

Davis had just picked up her three kids after school with plans on taking them to see “PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie.”

“I’m just going to miss the environment of it all, the people who worked here and the cleanliness of it,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find a clean theater location and they really kept up with it. It just felt comfortable.”

Cotati resident Damon Allen has gone to the Rohnert Park theater for the past decade and would bring his daughter to take advantage of the half-off tickets and popcorn the theater offered every Tuesday.

They loved going to the special movie events the theater would hold.

“We would take advantage of seeing a movie that I saw when I was a little kid that I could take my daughter to,” he said.

He had just been at the theater Tuesday night with his daughter to watch “Taylor Swift: The Era’s Tour” movie experience and said there were no signs that the movie theater would close the next day.

“It’s going to be a lot less movies and more money (to spend) when I do go see a movie,” Allen said. “It was real convenient and you couldn’t beat the cost.”

Reading International — an entertainment real estate company based in the Los Angeles suburb of Commerce with properties in Australia, New Zealand and the United States — took ownership of the theater in 2008, according to previous Press Democrat reporting.

Representatives from the theater, and its owner Reading International, had not made themselves available for comment since news of the theater’s closing broke.

The posted notice offered no explanation for the sudden closure, only directing those with gift cards and ScreenSaver tickets to a company email address.

Located on the west side of Rohnert Park, it was previously the Stadium 16 owned by Pacific Theaters before Reading International purchased it.

It was the only theater in Rohnert Park with a TITAN XC theater, which the movie house touted as an extreme cinema auditorium, giant state-of-the-art digital screen with surround sound and premium stadium seating.

The theater, like many, closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened on March 19, 2021, with social distancing protocols.

You can reach Staff Writer Sara Edwards at 707-521-5487 or sara.edwards@pressdemocrat. com. On Twitter @sedwards380.