The two Showcase movie theaters on Long Island answer to a new owner this week. Kinepolis, the Belgian company that runs one of Europe's largest cinema networks, completed its purchase of Showcase Cinemas on September 14, and the deal carries both Island 16: Cinema de Lux in Holtsville and the Showcase Cinema de Lux on Broadhollow Road in Farmingdale with it.

What actually sold

The sale covers 13 Showcase theaters across four states: seven in Massachusetts, four in New York, one in Ohio and one in Rhode Island. The New York four are the two Long Island houses plus two theaters in Yonkers, at Cross County and Ridge Hill. Together the 13 hold 164 screens and just under 17,800 seats, drew about 4 million moviegoers last year, and took in more than 90 million dollars. Kinepolis valued the whole package at 30 million dollars, a number that says as much about the state of the movie theater business as any think piece could, since six of the buildings come with their own real estate.

The seller is Harbor Lights Entertainment, the company known until recently as National Amusements. If that name rings a bell, it should: National Amusements was the Redstone family's theater chain, the private company through which Sumner Redstone controlled Paramount and CBS. When David Ellison's Skydance took over Paramount, the theater chain changed hands too, and the new owners have now sold the theaters themselves to a buyer that actually wants to run movie theaters.

A Long Island story from beginning to end

There is a neat circle in this for Long Island. The Redstone theater business has its roots here: the family's Sunrise Drive-In in Valley Stream, opened in August 1938, was the first drive-in movie theater in New York State. The empire that eventually swallowed Paramount started, in part, with Long Islanders watching movies through their windshields off Sunrise Highway. Island 16, which National Amusements opened in Holtsville in 2002 with sixteen screens beside the Long Island Expressway at Nicholls Road, was one of the chain's showpieces. Now the whole line, from the drive-in to the recliner era, passes out of the family business that built it.

It is also the second Long Island movie house to change hands this summer, after a film producer bought Manhasset's 1936 movie house in August. The difference is scale: Manhasset Cinemas is a three-screen survivor, while Island 16 and Farmingdale are the kind of big-box multiplexes where much of Nassau and Suffolk actually sees its movies.

The paperwork is already in Albany

The change of ownership is not an abstraction happening in Brussels and Boston. It is already visible in New York State records. On September 16, two days after the deal closed, a new application landed at the State Liquor Authority for the food and beverage operation at 185 Morris Avenue in Holtsville, which is Island 16's address and home to its Chatters Bar and Grill. The applicant is an entity formed this spring whose registered address is the same Norwood, Massachusetts headquarters the theater chain operates from. That is what a sale like this looks like at ground level: a liquor license does not simply ride along when a business changes control, so the new ownership has to file for its own, and the filing is often the first trace of a deal that surfaces in local records.

What changes at the box office

For moviegoers, the honest answer is: probably nothing you will notice soon. Kinepolis has said it will keep the Showcase name and branding, and the things people actually drive to these theaters for, the recliners in about 80 percent of the auditoriums, the premium large-format screens, the bar in the lobby, are the assets it just paid for. The company has been operating in the United States since 2019, when it bought the MJR chain in Michigan, and it described this deal as extending its American footprint from Michigan to the East Coast. These are its first theaters in New York.

The line worth filing away for later is about real estate. Kinepolis noted that the purchase brings a valuable property position with future opportunities for redevelopment and optimization. That is standard acquisition language, and there is no indication anything is planned for either Long Island site. But a 78,000-square-foot building on the LIE at Nicholls Road, and a multiplex on the Route 110 corridor, are exactly the kinds of parcels that sentence gets written about, so it is worth remembering who owns them now.

In the meantime, the popcorn is the same and the showtimes are where they always were. The next time the trivia slide before the previews asks who owns the theater, the answer is a company in Ghent.