A being space for cinephiles

Launched in Portland last month, Living Room Theaters intends to create a more intimate and multi-purpose approach to movie going. The small complex has 6 screening rooms, each seating 38 to 64 audience members in home-theater style recliners and loveseats or at low-lit tables with plush chairs. Customers can sit down and relax in the screening/living room half an hour before the movie starts, ordering drinks from a full bar and finger food from a tapas-style menu. Unlike regular theaters, Living Room also serves breakfast, lunch and dinner in a casual restaurant and bar with capacity for 50 people. On sunny days, a roll-up garage door opens the restaurant for sidewalk cafe seating. Completing the being space concept, free wifi is available throughout the lounge and cafe. All of which will help bring in the grown-up customers Living Room Theaters is targeting; not just when they want to see the latest indie flick, but also for meeting up and hanging out in a comfortable, well-designed space, or having lunch while working on their own film scripts. 😉 Of course, let’s not forget the actual movies. Living Room Theaters is all-digital, and offers a proprietary digitizing technology that lets newcomers distribute their films without the high costs of making and shipping celluloid prints. Digital screening also enables the theater to premiere films that haven’t yet been distributed (on celluloid) in the rest of the country. Programming will focus on independent releases and foreign films. The company’s owners, Felix Martin and Ernesto Rimoch, both went to film school and started the business mainly to offer audiences a new movie-going experience. They’re already working on a second location in Miami, and aim to open 10-15 small theater complexes across the United States. Time for film-loving entrepreneurs in other countries to follow their lead? Related: Haute design cineplex