Ritz East theater is back with a new name, right on time for the Philadelphia Film Festival
With the newly named PFS East, the film society now operates nine movie screens across Philly.
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Old City’s Ritz East theater is coming back — and just in time to host the opening of the 31st Philadelphia Film Festival this week.
The Ritz East will become the Philadelphia Film Society East. On Wednesday, it will be one of two theaters screening the festival’s opening night feature, The Banshees of Inisherin with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The society’s Philadelphia Film Center will host the other screening and the festival’s opening night party.
The return of the theater, which closed during the pandemic, will be good news for the festival and film lovers, according to Andrew Greenblatt, executive director of the film society. The society sponsors the festival, which draws around 25,000 film lovers and scores of filmmakers each year.
“It was, frankly, the most important theater in the Philadelphia Film Festival for my entire run here. So the fact that we didn’t have it last year was a big change for us,” Greenblatt said.
“They fit the right size audiences for when we’re programming films,” he added. The East’s two cinemas seat about 250 and 300. The Philadelphia Film Society Bourse, which also used to be a Ritz, and the Ritz Five have more but smaller viewing rooms.
The three Philadelphia Ritz theaters, including the East and the Bourse, had all been part of the Landmark Theatres group, which closed several of its cinemas around the country in recent years, amid financial difficulties. Ritz Five is still a Landmark Theatre.
Spokesman Martin O’Rourke of the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which leases out the theater, said the film society has a five-year lease, with options to renew up to 20 years. Its starting annual rent is $60,000 plus a percentage of its gross revenue. Landmark, the previous tenant, had a lease that ran from August 1998 to July 2021, he said.
With the East, the film society now controls nine screens in the city and the organization has been working on improving its newest holding.
It has added new fixtures to the East building, updated the restrooms, and embarked on other spiffing-up projects that will be completed by the festival’s opening night. More extensive improvements will come later. Greenblatt said they may need to close the theater for a few weeks, but the goal is to have it open for good by Thanksgiving.
The theater has been around about 40 years at least, under various operators. Quite a few celebrities have visited over the years to promote their work: Matt Damon for The Bourne Identity, Sylvester Stallone for Rocky Balboa, Bradley Cooper for The Hangover Part I, and Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth, among others.
The new East’s offerings will likely be a mix of independent films and prestige studio releases, Greenblatt said. But the society will be attuned to what its community would like to see.
“The theater has a long history and I think it’s a theater that has a tremendous audience,” Greenblatt said. “We’ll see what we’re going to program there, but we’re very, very excited.”