Prince Charles Cinema might be getting a second London location

Any self-respecting Londoner knows that the best cinema in the capital (nay… the world?) is the Prince Charles Cinema, situated just off Leicester Square on the edge of Chinatown. And in what will surely seem like celluloid mana sent from the cinema gods, it’s now being reported that the Prince Charles Cinema is planning an expansion to a second site.

According to the Guardian, the team behind the cinema has put in a bid to take over the recently closed Stratford Picturehouse in East London.

That’s despite the Prince Charles Cinema being locked in a legal battle with Zedwell LSQ Ltd, whose owners, Criterion Capital, are looking to cut the original Leicester Square site’s lease and redevelop the location.

“Given what’s happened this year, I understand how it could look like we’re trying to shift operations, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Paul Vickery, the cinema’s head of programming, told the Guardian.

“We were looking for a pre-existing venue that needed a bit of love, which we could turn into a new site. Ideally, we’d want to go on to add a third or fourth space.”

Famous fans

A Stratford site makes a lot of sense — there’s a huge amount of footfall there due to the Westfield shopping centre, new homes are popping up all the time, increasing local resident numbers, and it’d be joining a growing number of cultural institutions in that area of London, including Soho Theatre, Walthamstow and the V&A Storehouse.

The only other cinema currently remaining in the area, a Vue in Westfield shopping centre, caters predominantly to blockbuster cinema, so it would have a different audience to the Prince Charles, which has built a hardcore fanbase over the years thanks to its dedication to cult, classic, and hard-to-come-by film screenings.

As a result, the cinema counts many high-profile stars among its patrons and friends, including directors Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and the infamous Tommy Wiseau, director of what's widely considered to be the worst film of all time — 2003’s The Room. He’s regularly hosting screenings of the film at the Leicester Square location — and would make the perfect ‘star’ for any Stratford site ribbon cutting.

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