Read time: 8 min.

If the excavator and towering mound of dirt are any indication, the next chapter of Muncie Mall’s transformation is about to begin. It looks like its old cinema will finally be demolished any day now. 

Muncie Mall once thrived with four enormous anchors, but redevelopment plans have quickly evolved over the past year. Last summer, its newish owners announced that the empty JCPenney would be torn down to make way for outparcel retail¹. A few months later, Hull Property Group expanded those plans to include Sears and the former movie theater². Then, in February, Hull revealed an even bigger vision: nearly the entire mall would be demolished³! The old theater appears poised to become the first visible casualty of that plan. According to the construction worker I spoke with on site, demolition is imminent. 

I’ve already written a detailed history of the Muncie Mall theater, but here’s the condensed version: United Artists opened the three-screen cinema at the four-year-old mall on July 25, 1974⁴, as “The Movies at Muncie Mall⁵.” From the beginning, the place was marketed as the most technologically advanced theater in town: for one thing, the projection system reduced the need for reel changes⁶. Elsewhere, a futuristic feature called the “Light Curtain” cast psychedelic, polarized beams across each screen in sync with the intermission music between films⁷.

For many Muncie residents, though, the theater’s biggest claim to fame wasn’t its technology. It became legendary for its midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where a notoriously-relaxed carding policy allowed plenty of underage moviegoers to experience the cult classic -and its audience participation- for the first time⁸.

By the late 1980s, United Artists was looking to pull out of Indiana. In 1990, it sold all eight of its Hoosier cinemas to Goodrich Quality Theaters⁹, which briefly reinvented the Muncie Mall cinema as a discount dollar theater. The experiment lasted barely a year: just before selling the multiplex to Kerasotes, Goodrich restored the place to showing first-run films¹⁰. For its part, Kerasotes simplified the theater’s name to simply “Muncie Mall.” It often shifted movies and showtimes between the mall location and its Northwest Plaza 8.

Unfortunately, Kerasotes and mall owner Simon Property Group clashed in 1996. Simon’s proposed $25 million mall expansion included a new multiplex on an outparcel. Kerasotes argued that building it violated its lease, which barred another theater at the mall. Simon countersued, maintaining that because the new cinema would be adjacent to -not physically attached to- the mall, the project complied with the agreement¹¹. In protest, Kerasotes declined to renew its lease at the mall in 2000¹². The theater sat empty, used only for storage space, until Alan Teicher of Troy, Ohio, reopened it as Dollar Movies at Muncie Mall in 2002 as part of his forty-three screen regional empire.

Unfortunately, the arrangement wasn’t to last: in 2005, an enormous Showplace 12 was built on Simon’s property- by Kerasotes! Teicher was forced to close Dollar Movies at Muncie Mall after only forty months of ownership, and the old theater was converted for use as a mall storage area. Today, the AMC 12 is the only place to see a first-release movie in town.

Now, twenty-one years after the theater showed its final movies –Sahara, Guess Who, The Pacifier, The Amityville Horror, Kicking & Screaming, or The Interpreter, depending on which screen you chose¹³– the old cinema is finally coming down. The signs have been there for a while, and I wasn’t surprised. When I visited in May, the door leading to the theater’s hallway stood wide open, revealing active interior destruction! I wasn’t bold enough to wander inside, but my friend Aidan was: as he drove past the place on his lunch break last week, he spotted a worker with a skid steer, stopped to ask if he could take a look around, and got permission to explore some of the abandoned theater.

Aidan followed the skid steer through the theater’s old external entrance, stepping into the hallway that once connected the cinema to the mall. Along the way, he noticed something few people have seen in decades: the mall’s original dark brick exterior wall, preserved behind the theater ever since the cinema was added in 1974. It was a fascinating glimpse of what the mall looked like before the expansion.

Aidan also photographed the theater’s long-abandoned entrance from the inside. The lobby sat just southwest of Britts -later Elder-Beerman- and was split into two sections. To the left, beyond a gate, moviegoers entered the lobby with its concession stand. To the right, facing the mall concourse, a row of posters advertised current and upcoming attractions, tempting shoppers to catch a movie before heading home.

My favorite of Aidan’s photos looks toward the screen in Theater 1, the auditorium closest to the mall concourse. Stripped of its seats, carpet, and decorations, the narrow room feels surprisingly small. It’s a reminder of how the multiplex auditoriums of the 1970s were much longer than the sprawling stadium-style theaters we know today.

Meanwhile, I took photos of the theater entrance from the mall proper since after all, it’s where I saw Shrek as an eleven-year-old! It’s funny how childhood memories can distort a place: back then, the theater seemed enormous. The cinema’s entrance was home to the tiny Mainstream Arcade for many years. Now, the games and claw machines are gone.

At any rate, Movies at Muncie Mall/Muncie Mall 3/Muncie Mall is soon set to be torn down. Buildings come and go, and the property’s redevelopment is probably long overdue. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic. For more than thirty years, this unassuming three-screen theater was part of countless childhoods, including my own. Soon, it will exist only in photographs like these, newspaper clippings, and the memories of everyone who walked through its doors.

The theater won’t be the only recent casualty. Even since my last visit, Muncie Mall has continued to empty out. Buckle has relocated to Muncie Plaza just north near Spencer’s -another former mall tenant-, while the local baseball card shop and banner store have also found new homes elsewhere. One by one, the remaining businesses keep disappearing, making it increasingly clear that this chapter of the mall’s history is drawing to a close.

Unfortunately, another piece of Muncie Mall’s history is about to disappear. Zales, one of the mall’s original opening-day tenants in 1970, is scheduled to close on July 2. After that, only a handful of national chains will remain: Maurices, Tradehome Shoes, Hot Topic, Finish Line, and Books-A-Million. It’s a sobering thought- a mall that was once packed with national retailers has been reduced to just a few familiar names waiting to see what comes next.

Muncie Mall’s next chapter may bring new investment, new businesses, and a new purpose for the morbund property. That’s a good thing! Even so, before the bulldozers erase the first piece of it, I think it’s worth pausing to remember what stood for more than half a century.

Sources Cited
1 Wiechmann, S. (2025, June 30). Muncie commission approves money to begin demolishing part of Muncie Mall. Indiana Public Radio. Web. Retrieved July 2, 2025. 
2Kramer, R. (2025, September 21). The Muncie Mall is about to change in a big way! Hull Property Group, a Georgia developer that owns 27 [Facebook]. Video.
3 Weichmann, S. (2026, February 26). IPR: Muncie Mall to be fully demolished. Indiana Public Radio [Muncie]. Web. Retrieved February 26, 2026. 
4 Douglas, B. (1974, December 15). Triple-Screen Cinema Coming to Muncie Mall. The Muncie Star. p. 43.
5 Douglas, B. (1975, July 20). Mall Tri-Plex Theater Ready to Open. The Muncie Star. p. 31.
6 (See footnote 5).
7 Mall Theater Complex Lists Opening Events (1975, July 15). The Muncie Star. p. 20.
8 Roysdon, K. (1982, September 25). Drive-in’s final weekend to feature classic 3-D films. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 18.
9 Gibson, R. (1992, May 14). Company has monopoly on indoor theaters. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 13.
10 Gibson, R. (1992, April 11). Discount theater a big hit. The Muncie Evening Press. Pp. 1-7.
11 Fransisco, B. (1996, July 12).  Will courtroom drama come to mall cinema? The Muncie Star Press. p. 6.  
12 McBride, M. (2005, May 11). The buck (movie) stops here beginning in June. The Muncie Star Press. Pp. 1-7. 
13 Closing Special (2005, June 10). The Muncie Star Press. p. 27.