Kevin Kelly

Ontario Place Face Lift.....

Friday, July 16, 2010

A plan is being considered to do a huge makeover of Ontario Place. It sounds like a project that doesn’t need to be done but they’re going to drop a huge amount of money on it anyway. It opened in the spring on 1971 and has always been pretty busy since then. They’ve upgraded their green space and their amusements but I’ve always liked the place. I’m especially sorry to see that they’re likely going to trash Cinesphere. For a number of years they would hold a 70mm film festival there in mid winter. They’d show some IMAX movies (they were phenomenal) but they’d also show feature films on their huge, five or six story high screen. I saw some pretty good movies there that looked great on the big screen: Superman, Top Gun, Apocalypse Now, Tron and Ghostbusters. I was never a fan of the old Ontario Place Forum with the stage that moved. I saw some great shows there, like Roy Orbison, Parachute Club and Ray Charles, but I didn’t care for the venue. However, it sounds like the province is going to make change for the sake of change and not to make things better.