It’s showtime
Warren Theater plans a new movie palace in Midwest City.
MIDWEST CITY — A private developer and Midwest City plan a 14-screen Warren Theatre as a second phase of their plan to bring additional retail to the community.
When the theater opens about 16 months from now, it will anchor the second phase of a $60 million project that kicked off just more than a year ago to turn about 50 acres of mostly rural land in the community’s southwest corner into an economic engine that both retailers and the city hope will be a regional draw.
It will be the third Warren Theatre complex built in Oklahoma by the Kansas-based chain.
“This proposed theater is our newest and greatest Warren Theatre luxury design,” William “Bill” Warren, founder and president of the company, told members of Midwest City’s Local Development Act Review Committee this week.
Besides auditoriums for each of the screens, Warren told committee members the theater will include four adult balconies and will feature the same upscale finishes seen in other Warren projects, including granite, marble,
hand-painted murals, neon lighting, sculpted ceilings and terrazzo floors.
The project also will use state-of-art sound and projection technology, the advent of which drove other theaters in the community to close about a decade ago, city officials noted.
The theater will be a major anchor of the Sooner Rose Shopping Center, on the northeast corner of SE 15 and Sooner Road.
The developer, Sooner Investment Group, seeks to use about $17 million in tax increment finance dollars to help fully build the $60 million project.
If plans are approved, the city will provide that money to the developer so it can remove some old building foundations and underground fuel storage tanks, plus move a pipeline and make other public improvements.
A first phase of the project, consisting of an 65,000-squarefoot Academy Sports + Outdoors and a 55,000-square-foot Hobby Lobby, opened in October.
Timing
Since Midwest City formed in the 1940s, the Sooner Rose area mostly had consisted of residential tracts, although an elementary school and an assisted living center were on or near the property.
“That area really stagnated while the rest of Midwest City exploded with growth,” said Robert Coleman, the city’s director of economic development. “The land is way underdeveloped and not used to its maximum and best use.”
The city began considering what might be done after much of the area was slammed by a massive tornado in May 1999.
Coleman said BancFirst bought the old Sooner Rose Elementary School in 2011 and demolished that building in 2015. Around the same time, Sooner Investment Group, in Oklahoma City, embarked on its first phase of the Sooner Rose project.
Midwest City and Sooner Investment Group plan for the theater and other associated retail projects, including restaurants on SE 15, to open sometime during the summer of 2018, they said Tuesday.
A third phase, which hopes to include an entertainment venue of some sort, could open about a year after that.
Some existing retail buildings in the area will remain, while others will be replaced with new buildings.
TIF plan in works
Before plans can proceed for the theater and other parts of the project’s second phase, Coleman said the city must create a tax increment financing district for the project.
Through its use, municipalities typically divert future property tax revenue increases from a defined area or district toward an economic development project or public improvement project in the community.
Coleman said Tuesday tax increment financing is a viable tool to use to redevelop that portion of Midwest City, noting he expects property tax revenues from the completed project to be about 1,000 percent or more than what the area generates now.
That new revenue, he continued, would benefit the local school and library systems, Oklahoma County and Rose State College.
Plus, Coleman said, he expects the overall project will create about 300 jobs and produce gross revenues of about $60 million annually after it has been open for about five years.
That means a significant influx of sales tax revenue that the community hasn’t enjoyed in the past, he said.
The theater project will be key in helping to drive that spending.
“Midwest City hasn’t had any movie theaters operational for about eight years, since the digital conversion,” he said. “At one time, we had 10 screens operational at three locations, and then Tinker Air Force Base had its theater.
“Now when people leave Midwest City to go see a movie, they take their money with them; they’ll typically have dinner and a movie, or even dinner, shopping and a movie.
“We really haven’t put a gauge on how much money we are losing because we don’t have any major entertainment options right now,” Coleman said. “Neither does the base, and there’s not another theater in eastern Oklahoma County, to speak of.”
Leland Clark with Sooner Investment Group said the developer seeks to bring not only Warren Theatre to the project, but also other interesting retailers.
Clark said Sooner Rose will have a different mix of tenants than Town Center Plaza, which Sooner Investment Group also built and continues to manage.
“We are trying to bring something entirely new and exciting to the city,” Clark said.