‘Farewell’: A Columbia movie theater near downtown has closed its doors
The curtains have closed for one Columbia movie theater.
The 14-screen Bow Tie Management Cinemas at Dutch Square Center mall at 421 Bush River Road has closed, according to signage on its door. The theater is listed as “permanently closed” on Google and it is no longer listed among the locations on the Bow Tie Management Cinemas website.
“We would like to thank everyone for your patronage, and it is with a heavy heart that we must say farewell,” read the letter posted on the theater door. “BTM Cinemas will be closed at this location after 4/20/25. We thank you again for being our amazing guests, and hope you continue to enjoy the movies wherever you may go next.
“Thank you for choosing BTM Cinemas. We will miss each and every one of you.”
Movie theater nostalgia site cinematreasures.org notes the Dutch Square 14 opened in December 1997 as part of the General Cinemas chain. It later became part of the AMC company — the nation’s largest theater chain — when AMC bought General.
AMC ran the theater until until Aug. 2022, when it briefly closed. It reopened a month later under the ownership of Bow Tie, a smaller chain that has locations in Colorado, New Hampshire, New York and Virginia.
The number of movie theaters in the Columbia area has dwindled in recent years.
The 10-screen AMC Classic at 5320 Forest Drive in Columbia closed its doors in September 2022. The seven-screen Regal Cinemas location on the roof of the Richland Mall closed in February 2022 after a 32 year run. The Richland Mall itself has since been demolished to make way for a new $100 million mixed use development. And the five-screen St. Andrews Cinemas on St. Andrews Road, which was a second-run discount theater, closed in December 2023 after a 40-year run under various companies.
The recent closure of Bow Tie Cinemas at Dutch Square leaves the Nickelodeon Theater, a two-screen, nonprofit art house cinema that shows a mix of independent and mainstream fare, as the only movie theater in or near the downtown Columbia core. Other theaters that remain open in the larger area include the Regal Columbiana Grande on Bower Parkway, the Spotlight Capital 8 on Columbia Mall Boulevard, the AMC Harbison 14 on Columbiana Drive, the Regal Sandhill in northeast Columbia, the Regal Northlake Village in Lexington, and the Big Mo Drive-In in Monetta.
This story was originally published May 19, 2025 at 2:10 PM.
