text: Originally known as the De Luxe Cinema, the theatre opened on 31 October 1924. It was aptly named after the design of the cinema, with armchair style seating in the dress circle which made the experience more comfortable and enticing for visitors.
  It was purpose-built as a cinema for entrepreneur William Kemball, who had built around 40 theatres across New Zealand. Designed by Llewellyn Williams, the cinema became the biggest cinema in Kemball’s theatre empire with seating for 1800 people.
  At the time of opening in the roaring twenties, it was the boom of silent movies, and the first feature to be screened was Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Ten Commandments’.
  Silent films were accompanied initially by an orchestra, and then, after 1927, by a Wurlitzer organ. The installation cost £10,000, the equivalent of around $1.2 million today! When talking films arrived in 1929, Kemball installed a sound system and his was the first cinema chain operator to show the ‘talkies’, as they were then called.