Village 8 Cinema

Jason Whyte on January 12, 2023 at 1:11 pm

This location closed on January 5th, 2023.

I had many years of covering and hosting at this theatre with my time with the Whistler Film Festival since 2007. It was somewhat of an odd theatre built underground the Village Stroll in Whistler Village in the late 1990’s by Metropolitan Theatres, and Imagine Cinemas took over in 2016.

Metropolitan also ran the smaller Garibaldi 5 location south of Whistler Village in Squamish, and the seats in that location were relocated here and installed in 1, 2, 7 & 8.

Eight very small screens, with the smallest at about 60 seats and the largest at 120 seats. The back couple of rows were on a small stadium riser but otherwise all flat seating. All screens were scope, floating screens with no masking, yet in the intimate screening rooms the screen size was pretty good depending on where you sat in the auditorium. It was 35mm (which you could easily hear in the auditorium) when I first started going to WFF but it was converted to all digital around 2011/2012.

There was a small restaurant called Three Below adjacent to the main lobby but a separate business. In addition, there was a box office that was removed when Imagine Cinemas took over, and Imagine did a few cosmetic upgrades with updated carpeting and self-serve Pepsi concessions. It also had a bizarre accessible entrance all the way at the end of the theatre hallway accessible very far from the entrance.

I’ll dig through my archives and see if I can post some photos. It was a pretty unique cinema, even for Whistler, and even though attendance was sparse at best in its later years it’s still a loss for the village.