History
The Auckland Civic Theatre was the creation of Thomas O'Brien, who built a movie empire in Auckland's inner suburbs in the 1920s and brought the atmospheric cinema to New Zealand when he opened in 1928 Dunedin's Moorish-style Empire De Luxe Theatre (now the Rialto multiplex houses several small cinemas inside the original one in Moray Place.)
Thomas O'Brien persuaded a group of wealthy Auckland businessmen to build a massive atmospheric cinema in Queen Street and also managed to secure a $180,000 loan from the Bank of New Zealand.
The cinema was built by Fletcher Construction. However, the BNZ loan and soaring construction costs caught the attention of Parliament, while the final price tag ballooned to over $200,000.
The Civic opened amid great fanfare in December 1929, but the onset of the Great Depression contributed to disappointing attendances - as did O'Brien's stubborn insistence on showing British rather than the more popular American films, and he eventually became bankrupt. After several modifications during the following decades, the theatre was eventually restored to very near its original design in the late 1990s.
The theatre recently also gained some insider fame by being used for the scenes representing a New York Theater in Peter Jackson's King Kong remake.
Read more about this topic: Auckland Civic Theatre
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