Focus | Movie theater: ‘We’re moving forward’

Theatre developer on track for planned September 2010 opening

Story by Chris Graham
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Brett Hayes expected the attention. He didn’t expect the expectation that something bad was going to happen to kill his movie-theater project.

“We’re moving forward,” said Hayes, who is developing a Lew Dewitt Boulevard property into an eight-screen digital movie theater that is on track to open for business in September 2010.

A run of wet and early winter weather has pushed the construction schedule internally, but the planned Sept. 1 opening for Zeus Digital Theaters is unchanged from where Hayes had things several weeks ago.

Even so, Hayes has had to deal with questions about the progress on the project, and a rumor that began floating around town a couple of weeks ago that the project was off because of a financing issue.

That is not at all the case, Hayes emphasized.

“We’re in the process of bringing subs (subcontractors) in and talking with them as we’re designing the building,” said Hayes, noting the work that has been done on site to get things ready for the start of construction in the coming weeks.

“Our site is muddy. We’re having to work with that to get it to dry. We only have a little bit of elevation we have to lift up on the pad, but it has to be dry for us to put it there. Can’t be frozen, can’t be wet,” Hayes said.

Waynesboro has not had a first-run movie theater since the Wayne Theatre in Downtown Waynesboro closed in 1999. There have been two publicly known efforts to develop a new movie theater in Waynesboro in the past dozen years, most recently in the middle part of the 2000s decade involving the Columbus, Ga.,-based Carmike Cinemas.