logo
Cult London cinema beloved by Tarantino threatened with closure

Cult London cinema beloved by Tarantino threatened with closure

Yahoo28-01-2025

A cult London cinema beloved by Quentin Tarantino is at risk of closure amid fears its landlord is plotting a redevelopment of the site.
The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square has warned its future is under threat and accused the property's owner of 'intimidation' in a bitter row over the renewal of its lease.
The cinema claims its landlord, which is ultimately controlled by Asif Aziz, a millionaire developer, is demanding a rent increase significantly above market rates and laying the groundwork to shut the business and redevelop the property.
The row is likely to spark concern among film lovers, given the Prince Charles's status as one of the country's best-loved cinemas.
The Prince Charles is the last independent cinema operating in London's West End. It hosts around 850 films and events each year, attracting more than 250,000 customers.
The venue is known for its seasonal and off-beat programming, including all-nighters dedicated to the Jurassic Park series and Arnold Schwarzenegger films and festive sing-alongs to The Muppet Christmas Carol. It also shows 70mm pressings of classic films and rarely screened foreign language movies.
The cinema has attracted praise from film makers including Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, who described it as 'Mecca for lovers of quality films'. John Waters, the writer and director of the 1980s hit Hairspray, has called it 'the most depraved and beautiful movie theatre in London'.
The Prince Charles said its landlord Zedwell LSQ, which is ultimately controlled by Mr Aziz, was demanding a rent increase significantly above market rates.
It said Zedwell had also demanded the insertion of a break clause that would require the cinema to vacate the premises at six months' notice should the company receive planning permission to redevelop the site. The cinema said it viewed this as a 'clear intention' to repurpose the building.
Zedwell is part of Mr Aziz's Criterion Capital, which owns prime property in London's Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus.
The Prince Charles said: 'We believe that these tactics amount to an attempt by the landlord and Criterion Capital to use their significant financial resources to intimidate us, regardless of our legal entitlement.'
The cinema, which is owned and operated by Bubble Chamber, plans to launch legal proceedings in an effort to secure a renewal at market rate and protection from any redevelopment projects. It is also asking customers and fans to sign a petition demanding the removal of the redevelopment clause.
A spokesman for Criterion Capital said: 'Bubble Chamber Limited has initiated lease renewal proceedings on Prince Charles Cinema and the landlord has responded in accordance with Landlord and Tenant Act 1954.'
Criterion's flagship project is the London Trocadero, which has been partly converted into the Zedwell, a hotel with more than 700 windowless rooms.
The developer has previously attracted controversy after unveiling plans to convert part of the building's basement into a mosque. It is also under fire for its plans to close the world's first YMCA on Tottenham Court Road after buying the site last year.
Phil Clapp, the chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, said: 'The Prince Charles is unique in a lot of ways and it has a symbolism and a value that goes beyond even the fantastic service it provides to its audiences.
'It's an institution and I think its loss would be keenly felt not just by its audiences but by the broader London and national cinema ecology.'
The site first opened as a theatre in 1962 before gaining notoriety in the 1970s as a pornographic film house. During this time it claims to have hosted the UK's longest theatrical runs of erotic films Emmanuelle and Caligula.
In 1991, the Prince Charles was taken over by Robins Cinemas and found its niche as a repertory cinema playing cult classics for £1 a ticket.
The cinema generated headlines in 2023 when it announced it had no intention of changing its name ahead of the coronation of Charles III.
Last year it was forced to cancel the world premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a film written entirely using artificial intelligence (AI), following a backlash from customers and across the industry.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

I'm Rewatching All the Jurassic Park Movies Before Jurassic World: Rebirth. Here's Where You Can Binge the Whole Franchise
I'm Rewatching All the Jurassic Park Movies Before Jurassic World: Rebirth. Here's Where You Can Binge the Whole Franchise

CNET

time4 hours ago

  • CNET

I'm Rewatching All the Jurassic Park Movies Before Jurassic World: Rebirth. Here's Where You Can Binge the Whole Franchise

I first encountered Jurassic Park one fateful day during middle school when my teacher rolled in a cart topped with a CRT television, popped in a VHS tape of Jurassic Park and pressed play. I was instantly hooked, and I've since watched the film countless times, including a 2013 trip to see the movie in 3D on the big screen at my AMC theater. Jurassic World: Rebirth is slated to hit cinemas on July 2, and I'm planning to rewatch the entire series. With run times ranging from 1 hour and 32 minutes for Jurassic Park III to a whopping 2 hours and 27 minutes for Jurassic World: Dominion, binge-watching the franchise is a 12-hour-and-27-minute-long commitment. Or 14 minutes longer if you watch the 2-hour, 41-minute extended edition of Jurassic World: Dominion. But life finds a way. So if you're like me and want to revisit all six Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, here's where you can stream the series before Rebirth stomps into theaters in July. Based on my calculations, it'll take 12 hours and 27 minutes to watch all six of the previously released Jurassic Park and World movies (not including popcorn and bathroom breaks). If you watch Jurassic World: Dominion's extended edition rather than the theatrical cut, that balloons to 12 hours and 41 minutes. Screenshot/CNET How to watch the Jurassic Park movies before Rebirth All six movies in the franchise, including the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films, from the 1993 classic to 2022's Jurassic World: Dominion, are available on Peacock, providing a convenient home for your binge-watch. At $8 per month for the base plan or $14 a month for Peacock Plus, that's less than $3 per flick -- you'd be hard-pressed to buy or rent the series digitally for that cheap. If you don't have Peacock and would prefer not to sign up for the service, you can rent or buy the various Jurassic Park films from Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home and other digital video retailers. James Martin/CNET Peacock Carries the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies Peacock hosts all the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films, so you can conveniently watch the entire series on the streaming service. Peacock Premium costs $8 per month or $80 annually. Peacock Premium Plus -- which removes ads (with limited exceptions), lets you download some titles for offline viewing, and provides local NBC affiliate channel streaming -- is $14 per month or $140 per year. In addition to the Jurassic Park and World flicks, you can stream Poker Face, Black Bag, Law & Order: Organized Crime and a slew of other movies and shows. Instacart Plus subscribers get Peacock Premium bundled with their subscription at no extra cost. If you regularly get groceries and other goods delivered, an Instacart Plus plan, which goes for $10 a month or $100 per year, could be a cost-effective way to get popcorn delivered straight to your door so you can stay on the couch streaming Jurassic Park. See at Peacock Do you need to watch the whole Jurassic Park franchise before Jurassic World: Rebirth? Moe Long/CNET You should watch the entire Jurassic Park series prior to Rebirth. There are many through lines and plot points connecting the movies, including the Jurassic World expansion expounding on the genetic experimentation themes from the original trilogy. Jurassic Park's sequel, The Lost World, saw the return of Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) return in Jurassic Park III. Jurassic World revived the franchise in 2015 with the action back on Isla Nublar -- where everything started in the original film -- this time with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard starring. Goldblum returns in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom alongside Pratt and Howard. Jurassic World: Dominion sits firmly in the middle of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World Venn diagram, with franchise stars Pratt, Howard, Goldblum, Neill and Dern comprising the ensemble cast. Though there's continuity among the entire series to varying degrees, the Jurassic World movies really build on one another. You may be able to skip Jurassic Park III if a nearly 13-hour marathon is biting off more than you can chew -- the film even takes place on a different island from the original, Isla Sorna. But Fallen Kingdom, Dominion and Rebirth are fairly interconnected, with critical world-building elements. So, though I recommend watching everything, you should at the very least watch Jurassic Park and The Lost World alongside the Jurassic World flicks. In addition to the mainline films, there are a couple of spin-off TV series: Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. Both shows are canon, and although you don't have to watch them to follow the film series, they're additive, providing more of the franchise to explore for hard-core fans. Both Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory are available to stream on Netflix.

The Creative Potential of AI: From a Master at Building Blockbuster Movie Worlds
The Creative Potential of AI: From a Master at Building Blockbuster Movie Worlds

Newsweek

time6 hours ago

  • Newsweek

The Creative Potential of AI: From a Master at Building Blockbuster Movie Worlds

During the pandemic lockdown, when Rick Carter found himself alone in his Los Angeles home, he began to experiment with something that would have seemed impossible just months earlier: an artificial collaborator that could visualize his wildest creative impulses. The legendary production designer—who had spent decades collaborating with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron and J.J. Abrams on the dinosaur-filled landscapes of Jurassic Park, the floating mountains of Avatar, the bus stop bench of Forrest Gump and the Jakku deserts of The Force Awakens—was prompting an AI called Midjourney. "I started to make these little videos on AI combining ballet and skateboarding in Paris," Carter recalls of his early surreal experiments, "flying, basically, so that they could do things you can't do." For someone accustomed to creating cinema's most ambitious visual spectacles, this felt familiar yet revolutionary. "The AI came up with it very easily," he says, "I mean, very easily." Carter represents a fascinating paradox in Hollywood's current AI anxiety. An Academy Award winner for his production design on both Avatar and Lincoln, whose filmography includes the Back to the Future sequels, Forrest Gump, AI: Artificial Intelligence, Munich and The Rise of Skywalker, Carter sees something entirely different from the industry orthodoxy. While Nicolas Cage declared that "Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us!" and show business leaders warn of artificial intelligence's threat to both creative integrity and livelihoods in the entertainment industry, Carter views AI as the next evolution of a creative process he's been perfecting for half a century. For instance, Spielberg makes "a point of not knowing what he's going to do," Carter explains. "He used to storyboard a lot. Now he makes a big point of not knowing at the beginning of a project what he's getting into." Spielberg has learned to trust his process rather than reverse-engineer outcomes. With uncertainty came fear, and that was part of the process too. "I asked Steven," Carter says, "'Why do you want to not know? And why do you want to be afraid?' And his answer was, 'Well, if I know what I'm going to do, then it's like having a job at Denny's, and I'm just servicing an order.'" As Carter was prompting AI video generators Midjourney and later Runway, he encountered many of the same feelings of uncertainty and creative fear that bordered on the spirit of collaborative discovery with Spielberg—throwing ideas into the digital void and watching something unexpected emerge. What began as pandemic experimentation would lead him to a profound realization about the nature of creativity itself—one that would be tested in the most unexpected way. Carter's perspective is borne of his life's work: creating worlds so believable that audiences never notice his hand in their construction. "There's nothing I can say that will ever explain to you what a production designer does," he admits. "It's certainly connected to the suspension of disbelief. You don't want to see it. When you're watching a movie, you don't want to think somebody has put together the world that you're looking at." This dedication to invisibility shapes everything about Carter's approach. Where most other people who make movies thrive on recognition—actors want to be seen, directors want their vision acknowledged, screenwriters want their scripts celebrated—production designers succeed by disappearing entirely. Carter spends months crafting environments that feel so natural, so inevitable, that they become transparent to viewers. It's an artistry rooted in covering every seam, hiding every constructed element, making the artificial feel authentic. Perhaps this explains Carter's comfort with AI as a creative partner. Like production design itself, AI works best when it enhances rather than dominates, when it serves the creative vision rather than calling attention to its own cleverness. Both require what Carter calls "trust"—a willingness to let the medium serve the message without overwhelming it. Before he was building movie worlds, Carter was the self-described "rebel" son of Dick Carter, actor Jack Lemmon's publicist business partner, and he spent much of the 1970s traveling the world, painting and absorbing visual influences. "I was a conscientious objector to Vietnam," Carter told an interviewer in 2012. "I was up at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1960s, and there was a lot of political rioting and turmoil. At a certain point, it became more than I could psychologically or spiritually handle, and I dropped out and traveled the world for over a year by myself. I wanted to go out and find something deeper that could give some purpose to my life." His entry into film production came through serendipity and family connections. The pivotal moment came when he asked his father what an art director did "because it had the word art in it," he says. This led to a meeting with Richard Sylbert, the accomplished production designer behind films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, who explained how production design could be a conceptual art form. Chinatown became an exemplar of what he wanted to accomplish. "At its core is the fact that in that world, there's no water. So, the design then became parched and amber. It was not the narrative, and it wasn't quite the theme, and it wasn't the characters," Carter says, "it was just a presence throughout the movie that became a type of production design." It was a revelation that would go on to shape his approach throughout his career, from his first collaboration with Spielberg on The Goonies in 1985 through their most recent work together on The Fabelmans in 2022. "There could actually be an intellectual and even heartfelt idea behind what you were looking at," Carter says. These elements of production design, he explains, are "curations of the prompts that you put in. And then you have this back-and-forth dynamic. That's happening when you design any movie; you're prompting the artist you're working with; you're being prompted, as a production designer, by the director as to what he [or] she wants to see. And then you come up with things, and there's a dialogue. It's back-and-forth. And it doesn't just come out of thin air." Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Canva While Hollywood treats AI as an almost taboo topic, Carter recognizes it as a natural extension of filmmaking's collaborative process. When digital effects began replacing practical ones in the 1990s, he adapted through collaboration rather than resistance. "That's when I took on Doug Chiang as a partner, as a co-designer, to bring him into my process and also because he knew how to do the digital side much better than I," he recalls. "That's why I went into co-designing on movies: as a way to survive that transition." His pandemic AI experiments became a laboratory for testing these theories. Isolated from his usual collaborative network, he found something in AI that he'd experienced with great directors: a creative entity that could understand his prompts and respond with something surprising. "The AI has this uncanny ability to take whatever you put there and come back with something right away," he explains. "But then think about, What's its point of view? It has no point of view." This absence of perspective, rather than being a limitation, became a creative advantage, as he understood that AI was a reflection of his own consciousness. "So you think more about, What is it? Why do I think this way, and what do I want now? What's the next iteration that would make it more interesting to me?" Carter says his career owes to his having "been fortunate enough to have gotten got by certain people who are geniuses with cinema—Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Jim Cameron, J.J. Abrams—they got me," he says. But AI offered something different. "Now, I'm not saying that the AI understands me. I'm just amazed that I can prompt it and even make mistakes, and it comes back with things that—well, I don't know if it's complementary. These are new terms that need to be created. I'm just going to call it 'an adjunct to what I am thinking.' It starts to interface with how I'm seeing things, and it stimulates me to move further in that direction." The AI becomes a creative partner—not replacing human creativity but amplifying and reflecting it in unexpected ways. Carter evaluates creative collaboration with different "filters." "Trust is a good one," he says, "because it doesn't quite go to, Well, does it have heart? or something that might get very vague. Whereas trust feels like it gets almost to a survival level. I trust that, or I don't trust, and my reaction was only instinctive." Trust becomes crucial when working with AI because "I know it has no heart," he says, "and I think the amount of heart it has, I think, has to be reflective of my own." Unlike human collaborators with their own agendas, AI remains purely responsive—a mirror reflecting the creator's intentions back with variations and possibilities. He points to Avatar as a model for AI integration: "The abstraction of the Na'vi people, with their features being not quite human, allowed for us to emote more with them and go back and forth, almost breathing [between] live action and digital." This "hybrid" approach could be crucial for AI adoption. "Anything that is 'all AI' shows up as being kind of too sterile or not quite right," he observes. He points to The Polar Express, the first entirely computer-generated film he worked on. "It was all digital and had tremendous problems with the characters and the lip-synching and the eyes and everything." Change will come "not from the top but from the bottom," he predicts. Young creators unburdened by industry traditions will experiment with AI tools and force established players to adapt. "It's gonna be people just doing it because they have no reason not to do it." At 72, Carter had been planning a measured retirement. "I'm post-pandemic, mid-70s, into a place where I thought I had it figured out how I was going to have a kind of moderate engagement: how much time I can have for myself, my family, all that," he reflects. He would finally find time to organize the vast collection of his own artworks and the film memorabilia he accumulated over decades. "My brain works a little differently at this stage anyway, because I'm not trying to accomplish. It's a different—it's [different from] when you're in the middle of your life, and you're aware that you're in your time of doing it and getting it done." Augmented Intelligence: Reflections on the Conversation with Rick Carter By Marcus Weldon, Newsweek contributing editor for AI and president emeritus of Bell Labs This is the second interview in our AI Impact series to cover AI's effect on the evolution of the video media and entertainment market; the first was with a leading prognosticator, Doug Shapiro, which we now complement with one of the most important practitioners in movie production history: Rick Carter. You can find my deeper analysis here, but my key takeaways from our conversation are: Movies—and the large-scale creative process in general—have always been a prompting process between an artist and multiple others who jointly enable the artwork to be produced. AI should be viewed as a co-creator that is prompted by an artist to allow the exploration of concepts and vistas that are ultra-human—beyond human conception or experience. AI has no heart; it is a reflection or echo of the human heart, which is intimately tied to our consciousness, through our desire and need to understand our experiences. We will (and should) apply filters to what AI produces, most importantly to assess the trustworthiness of the output and to parse for uncanniness. But other key filters that should be applied are "creative originality" (which we use as a proxy for "effort") and the shared value or impact on a larger human scale. And finally, if we are open to the potential and don't become too paranoid about the risks, generative AI tools and technologies will allow any creator to produce visually compelling content without massive capital, expertise or compromise, effectively leading to the democratization of creative expression. "And then the fire came and burned everything," he says, casually mentioning that seven weeks before our conversation, the Palisades fire consumed his home and everything in it. "Destroyed all my life's work on my personal side of painting, plus the house." The matter-of-fact delivery is almost as startling as the devastation itself. Yet Carter describes something closer to liberation. "I wanted to kind of cull through it [anyway]," he explains. The collection had become a burden because, "The kids would have to deal with it." The fire forced a creative reset that parallels his openness to AI. Just as losing his physical archive freed him from the weight of past accomplishments, engaging with AI freed him from traditional assumptions about creative collaboration. "Plan A went away," Carter says, highlighting that instead of setting new goals, he's "finding this new stage that's just not hung up on the thing being resolved, the entity being created, and that's it." Carter's vision for AI isn't about replacement but augmentation—having AI as a "co-journeyist" rather than a competitor, a tool that "just enhances your experiences and doesn't take away," he explains. "AI will absolutely enable the chaos that changes and alters the course of history," he predicts but adds that "AI will absolutely not enable clarity that will then allow us to continue as we are." So the technology will force adaptation, but that adaptation can be creative rather than destructive. "As an artist, I just have felt the high in my own brain that comes from having things put together in a new way. It's a new set of tools, something—I don't even know what the words are," Carter reflects. "We just don't have the lexicon yet." The absence of adequate language to describe AI's creative potential mirrors the early days of digital effects, when the industry struggled to understand how computer graphics might enhance rather than replace traditional filmmaking techniques. For Carter, AI isn't the end of artistic authenticity but the beginning of a new kind of creative dialogue—one that requires the same trust and collaborative spirit that has always driven great filmmaking. A partner waits, ready to respond to whatever prompts human creativity can imagine. After a lifetime of unrivaled creative expression that has played a defining role in human culture, Carter is more excited than ever about our uncertain creative future. He embodies the creative resilience the entertainment industry needs. "I'm interested in the process of how things are coming together or falling apart," he says. "New exploration."

Peacock Schedule June 9-15, 2025: New TV Shows & Movies Being Added
Peacock Schedule June 9-15, 2025: New TV Shows & Movies Being Added

Yahoo

time2 days ago

  • Yahoo

Peacock Schedule June 9-15, 2025: New TV Shows & Movies Being Added

Peacock has some exciting new TV and movie releases lined up for June 9–15, 2025. These include Ted Lasso Season 3 and the 80s supernatural comedy hit Ghostbusters. Ted Lasso Season 3 graces Peacock on June 10, 2025. Co-created by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly, this series follows the eponymous protagonist, an American football coach who moves to England after being hired to manage a soccer team. Unfortunately, managing the team proves to be a tall order for Lasso due to his inexperience with soccer. Soon, Lasso finds himself trying to win the trust and admiration of the cynical players and a skeptical town. Next, June 12 brings Ghostbusters to Peacock. This popular supernatural comedy film was helmed by Ivan Reitman and written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd. The story follows a group of parapsychologists who lose their academic positions at a prestigious university. Seeking a new lease on life, they form a business known as the Ghostbusters and begin exterminating ghouls and other supernatural pests for a living. Eventually, the group is hired by a knockout cellist to get rid of demons living in her refrigerator. Jurassic Park is also dropping on Peacock this week. This is an action sci-fi adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay penned by David Koepp. Over the years, the film has cemented itself as an important piece of pop-culture history. The story follows a wealthy entrepreneur who opens a theme park housing living dinosaurs from the prehistoric era. He invites a team of experts and their eager grandchildren to experience the park before opening day to help calm skeptical and anxious investors. Unfortunately, things go haywire and disastrous after the security systems go offline, and the dinosaurs begin escaping and rampaging across the park. Peacock is adding the following movies and television shows between June 9 and June 15, 2025. Flipping Out, Season 12 – Premiere (Bravo) Ted Lasso, Season 3 – Premiere (Apple TV+) (Also on Peacock) Ghostbusters (1984) Making It, Season 5 – Premiere (NBC) Jurassic Park Interested in more Peacock content? Check out the trailer for The Rainmaker, starring Lana Parrilla and Madison Iseman. Also, here's the release date window for and first picture from The Office spin-off The Paper. The post Peacock Schedule June 9-15, 2025: New TV Shows & Movies Being Added appeared first on - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store