Interesting that Landmark Theatres wants the World Exchange cinemas, but is playing coy about the Lansdowne Monsterplex. Maybe it'll end up as a 6-storey high Winners.
Cinema chain taking over World Exchange theatre, hopes to keep it open
BY DAVID REEVELY, OTTAWA CITIZEN OCTOBER 25, 2013
There’s hope for Ottawa’s main downtown movie house again: a Calgary-based cinema chain buying two other Ottawa cinemas is interested in keeping it open.
The Empire Theatres chain that has operated the World Exchange Plaza’s cinema, along with others in Kanata and Orléans and one it recently closed at the Rideau Centre, is bailing out of the movie-theatre business. It announced in the summer that it had broken its properties up between Landmark Theatres and Cineplex, but two Ottawa cinemas were left in limbo: the one under construction at Lansdowne Park and the one at the World Exchange. Neither of the buyers had picked them up and the World Exchange cinema, whose lease is up at the end of the year, seemed doomed.
But now Landmark has signed a deal with Empire to manage the World Exchange theatre until the lease is up, running it as the Landmark 7, and it wants to talk to the landlord about keeping it, said Neil Campbell, Landmark’s chief operating officer.
“Due to the location, I mean, it’s the perfect theatre for the downtown core group,” he said over the phone from Calgary. “You’ve got a good density around there. You’ve got a lot of moviegoers and to me it gears itself to a lot of students and the older crowd.”
Landmark is comfortable with the slightly higher-brow fare that the Exchange Centre cinema has generally shown (it has three large theatres and four smaller “screening-rooms”) and doesn’t intend to mess with it, Campbell said.
Nothing is settled, he emphasized. “We think it’s a neat location [but] I don’t want to get into too many details because we have to talk the landlord.”
Campbell said he’s looking forward to telling a Facebook group of loyal patrons that rallied to show they want Ottawa to keep a downtown cinema showing mainstream, first-run flicks.
“It is the most organized, most well-spoken group we’ve ever dealt with,” he said.
The landlord, British Columbia Investment Management Corp., has asked the city for permission to remove the cinema and replace it with offices, though the leasing manager has said that is to keep options open. Converting windowless, sloping-floor theatres into offices is expensive.
“The incentive for us is to carry on” with movies, Daniel Gray told a city council committee that met to consider the issue at the beginning of the summer but didn’t make a decision. (It’s not clear whether the owner really needs the city’s permission; the question of whether the building owner has to keep an “entertainment use” in the building is set out in old development agreements that have been amended several times.) Three chains had approached him in at least a general way about the possibility of taking the space over, he said at the time.
The future of the Lansdowne theatre remains an open question and it could affect the prospects for the World Exchange. The Ontario Sports and Entertainment Group has a lease with Empire for a theatre and both sides have said repeatedly that they expect there will be a theatre there, but nobody has said yet who might run it. Distribution deals often prevent theatres within a few kilometres of each other from getting the same movies, so competition between Lansdowne and the World Exchange could make things dicey.
Campbell said whatever ends up happening at Lansdowne, Landmark is completely uninvolved in it and he has no idea what the Lansdowne theatre’s future is.
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that's perfect. Suck it nimbys! 
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