By Garry Maddox
It’s a highly successful art-house cinema - a landmark in Sydney’s Paddington - that was officially opened by Nicole Kidman on Valentine’s Day in 1996 while then-husband Tom Cruise waited outside to whisk her off to a romantic dinner.
But a planned redevelopment means the Palace chain will close the Verona cinema in Oxford Street early next year and turn the lights back on at an old Hoyts’ venue down the hill at Moore Park.
Nicole Kidman at the official opening of the Palace Verona in 1996 with Palace Cinemas founder Antonio Zeccola and his daughter Stephanie Zeccola.Credit: Palace
Chief executive Benjamin Zeccola described it as a sad end for “a spectacular and glorious location for cinema”.
The redevelopment follows longtime owner Robert Bleakley, the founder of Sotheby’s Australia, selling the Verona building for $30.8 million to interests associated with Sammy Soliman, Kevin Malouf, Brad Duff and Jack and Thomas Joseph in 2021.
They plan to substantially demolish it for a six-storey development that includes shops, offices and cultural and entertainment areas in a two-level basement and a rooftop bar.
Zeccola said the new owners offered Palace the chance to rent a basement space that could house four cinemas with up to 250 seats in total – down from four cinemas with almost 400 seats – but the proposed rent meant it was not viable to keep the Verona operating.
“They’ve been a good landlord but the reality is that sky-high construction costs, real estate values and wages, combined with hostile parking policies that make accessibility difficult for locals, make that proposal unfeasible,” he said.
When the Verona closes in February, the chain plans to simultaneously reopen a venue that Hoyts operated as Cinema Paris until just before the pandemic at the Entertainment Quarter.
“We’ve been asked by our customers for many years, ‘can we please have a Palace cinema in Sydney with ample parking?’,” Zeccola said. “We were looking for exactly that when we remembered there’d been a four-screen cinema at the Entertainment Quarter that had fallen into disuse.”
Palace plans to rent that cinema, spend $500,000 to move in and refresh the amenities, then reopen it as Palace Moore Park.
Closing in February: the Verona Cinema in Paddington.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Zeccola said that contractually the new cinema would not be able to compete with the nearby Hoyts EQ, which is screening such mainstream films as The Marvels and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
“We’ll focus on our film festivals, foreign, art-house and indie content,” he said.
Palace had three cinemas on Oxford Street in Paddington until the Academy Twin closed when the chain was unable to renew the lease on that building in 2010. When the Verona shuts, it will only have the Chauvel left.
Zeccola is hoping film lovers will make Palace Moore Park their new local cinema.
Due to reopen as part of the Palace chain in the new year: the old Cinema Paris at the Entertainment Quarter.Credit: Edwina Pickles
A spokesman for the Verona building’s owners, Tom Speakman, said that while the City of Sydney had yet to approve the development application, the intention was to have four cinemas with more than 250 seats in a new building that would retain the existing facade, awning and other elements.
The longtime general manager of Palace Cinemas in Sydney, Nicolas Whatson, now the head of Palace distribution, said loyal customers had turned the Verona into one of the country’s best art-house operations.
“Everyone is still processing it,” he said of the closure. “With the change of the ownership of the building, everyone knew there was the possibility they might have plans for the site but I don’t think anyone quite expected that we’d be shutting.
“Mostly because you don’t expect it to be happening to, for the most part, thriving venues.”
Whatson said the box office on Oxford Street became a marketing tool for the cinema. When there was a queue down the street, “people would walk past going, ‘what’s going on?’”
He remembered Kidman officially opening the Verona with sold-out screenings of her film To Die For.
“She started to get a little bit edgy because we were dealing with an absolutely packed venue and things were running a little late,” he said. “I remember Tom Cruise being parked outside in his car; he was shooting Mission: Impossible 2 in Sydney at the time.
“We got the sense he was starting to get a little irritated that his Valentine’s Day date, Nicole, was running late, but she was incredibly generous. She ended up introducing all four auditoriums.”
Another major success for the Verona was the 1996 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman documentary When We Were Kings.
“It had back-to-back-to-back sold-out sessions for months,” Whatson said. “It became a bit of a cultural phenomenon. I have very strong memories of turning around and seeing Kerry and James Packer walking up the stairs surrounded by security guards.
“I suspect that they didn’t normally go to public cinemas to watch films but they clearly knew that there was something going on.”
Whatson said Lachlan Murdoch, now chief executive of Fox Corporation, once hired a cinema for a private staff screening of Independence Day.
“It was a Twentieth Century Fox film,” he said. “He was quite young at the time but I imagine, as he was learning the ropes of the business, he came and checked out his own production at Verona.”
Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.
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