Sunshine Cinema, the popular Lower East Side movie theater housed in a historic vaudeville house, is set to close next weekend.
Deadline Hollywood reports that the theater that opened in 2001 will show its last films on Jan. 21 in order to make way for a retail development at the East Houston Street building.
The CEO of Landmark Theatres, which owns Sunshine, told Deadline they had known the closing was coming and that "there's nothing to celebrate."
Sunshine had become a go-to spot for Manhattan moviegoers looking for arthouse films and cult classics such as "The Room" and was a common spot for star-studded world premieres of films such as "The Big Sick."
The theater also made headlines in 2014 when Landmark called off the premiere of "The Interview," a 2014 film that lampooned North Korea and prompted the country to hack and release emails from Sony Pictures.
It's not clear what will become of the building that houses the theater, once known as the Houston Hippodrome. The structure was built in 1898 and was a early movie house and Yiddish vaudeville theater.
