Thrifty moviegoers’ haven, the Oracle View, goes dark

The upcoming arrival of a Comcast Cable customer support center left little space and even fewer parking spots for the theater housed inside the former American Home Furnishings building near the Tucson Mall.

“When we pack it in today, that’s it,” Kent Edwards, managing partner of Grand Cinemas, the company that ran the movie theater since 2003, said Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m not sure what people are going to do for discount movies,” he said. “It was the last discount theater on this side of town.”

In May, Comcast announced a plan to hire 1,125 people to staff a customer support center in Tucson. In August, the company announced it had signed a lease with building owner Tanager Co. to take over the former American Home Furnishings building, most of which was vacant for several years.

Companies as large as Comcast are usually stable, long-term tenants, said Greg Furrier, partner at Cushman & Wakefield/Picor, who represented the Tanager Co. in the lease negotiations.

“Any time you get a chance to make a deal with that kind of company, you make it,” he said.

The movie theater’s lease was set to expire at the end of October and the building owner bought out the remaining time on the lease, Furrier said.

Even if the Tanager Co. could have sliced off the movie theater’s space from the area leased to Comcast, the call-center employees would have left virtually no parking for moviegoers, Furrier said.

Edwards called the closure of the movie theater a “devastating blow.”

“We serve an entire community of people on a restricted income,” he said.

Seniors regularly attended the movies as a way to get out of the nursing home and “see the world,” he said. Day-care centers also would use the theater as an economical treat for children.

He looked for other locations in Tucson to house the theater, but so far he hasn’t found a building that “fit right,” he said. The former Catalina Theater near North Campbell and East Grant looked appealing, but it was unavailable.