Avoca Beach Theatre, Movie theater in Avoca Beach, Australia.
Avoca Beach Theatre is a cinema in Avoca Beach, a coastal town on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. It has several screens equipped for different film formats and also hosts live shows and events throughout the year.
Norman Hunter moved to Avoca Beach in 1948 and began weekly outdoor film screenings with prints from Shell Australia; the proceeds went towards a local rockpool. Construction of a 500-seat cinema began in autumn 1951 to a design by local architect T.A. Mayo, using recycled materials, and it opened that December with the comedies Two Weeks with Love and The Big Hangover. Paul Brennan bought the business in 1974 and ran it until 1992; the Hunter family took over operations again in late 2006.
The theatre regularly screens Australian productions alongside independent films, drawing visitors from across the Central Coast. It works as a shared space where people from nearby towns come together around a love of cinema.
Checking the programme online before visiting is a good idea, as the schedule changes regularly between films and live events. The venue is easy to reach from the surrounding coastal towns and works for both casual evenings and planned outings.
The BBC listed the Avoca Beach Theatre among the ten most beautiful cinemas in the world. The building was designed by local architect T.A. Mayo and opened in December 1951, with recycled materials: seats and projectors came from an MGM theatre in Manly and steel beams from the Hunter family property at Emu Plains.
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