Warner Village Cinemas UK was a chain of multiplex cinemas operated by Warner Brothers in the United Kingdom. Created in November 1996, it was a joint venture between Warner Bros.Intl. Theatres and Village Roadshow Australia.The expansion to building more sites of Warner Village Cinemas around the UK starting from 1997 to November 2002. In the UK the chain with 36 cinemas with 383 screens was subsequently purchased by SBC International Cinemas in May 2003, which re-branded all cinemas as Vue starting late march 2004 this included the refurbishment of the cinema foyers, the lighting and replacing screen numbers in limeted cinemas. On late October 2009 Warner Village Cinemas has been bought by the Benetton Group in Italy and has merged with Mediaset's Medusa Cinema to create The Space Cinema. It was originally a joint venture between Warner Bros. International Theatres, Village Roadshow Australia and Focus Srl., the local Italian partner.
The most notable Warner Village Cinema was in Leicester Square, London, and was a multiplex used only to host Warner film premieres. This theatre features two bas-relief sculptures, Sight and Sound, sculpted by Edward Bainbridge Copnall.
The United Kingdom chain was bought by Vue Cinemas.
The cinema chain also operates in Taiwan opening a cinema and a containing shopping mall named Warner Village Centre in Taipei. In 2005 it was renamed as Vieshow Cinemas.
At one time, Warner Village Cinemas was the sponsor of LWT's weather forecasts
Famous quotes containing the words warner and/or village:
“It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
—Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)