Manhasset Cinemas sells for $3 million to film production company Assemble Media

A film company has big plans to turn a historic Manhasset movie theater into a newly rehabbed theater.

The film production company Assemble Media purchased the 15,500-square-foot movie Manhasset Cinemas at 430 Plandome Road and the corner retail space next door for $3 million, said Clem Coté, a managing principal at Sovereign Realty Group based in Syosset, who arranged the deal for Assemble Media and the seller, Cinemas GMC LLC.

Assemble Media plans to renovate the currently shuttered theater and add an IMAX screen, Coté said. Assemble Media, headed by film producer Jack Heller, has already started emptying the theater of debris after closing on the purchase at the end of July, Coté said.

The building has long been a theater, and Coté said he was glad that Assemble Media intended to keep it that way.

“For anyone who lives in this area, this is really the only place to go” to watch a movie, Coté said. “I think they were really keen on keeping it this way.”

The three-screen cinema building has been run by several different operators, including Clearview Cinemas in the early 2010s and Bow Tie Cinemas by 2015, according to Google Images of the property from the time. A new operator took over in 2019, after Great Neck-based real estate investor and property manager Gilman Management Corp. bought the property in 2018, Newsday reported.

The theater struggled during the pandemic as local businesses were forced to shutter, and the theater’s operator sued Gilman and its affiliates, claiming Gilman failed to honor a 2019 agreement for the operator to end its contract at the Manhasset theater. The case was settled in December out of court, records show.

A representative for Gilman Management Corp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The number of independent movie theaters on Long Island and in the United States shrank in the wake of the pandemic, Newsday reported.

Coté was unsure whether the theater would remain closed during the renovation work. A representative for Assemble Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Coté expected that the renovation, once completed, would benefit Manhasset.

“I think that Assemble Media is going to inject new life into that portion of the village,” Coté said. “If you have a chance to preserve something that has meaning and just inject new life into it, I think that's a great course to go on.”