Ask anyone in Kennesaw where the Regal was and they'll point at Town Center at Cobb. The theater sat outside it, on its own parcel and parking field northeast of the main building.
Regal Town Center Stadium 16 opened in May 1986 as Storey's Town 8 Theatre in Kennesaw, Georgia, grew to 12 screens in 1991, and was expanded in 1999 into a 16-screen stadium complex. It closed for good in September 2020.
Separate parcel, separate fate. The 17.9 acres sold for $13 million in December 2021 and are approved for 350 apartments, while the mall itself went through two foreclosures.
That property line explains most of what happened next.
Town 8 opened with a 70mm room, May 1986
Storey Theatres opened Town 8 Theatre on May 23, 1986, at 2795 Town Center Drive NW in Kennesaw, Georgia.
Eight screens, and a mall next door that was three months old.
Town Center at Cobb had opened that February between I-75 and I-575, in an area far less built up a few years earlier.
The theater took the mall's name and stayed outside it, on its own parcel northeast of the main building.
That property line would decide the site's future 35 years later.
One room set the place apart. Storey built a dedicated 70mm auditorium and hung it with tear-drop curtains, while the 35mm houses used vertical ones.
The curtains opened when the feature started and closed after the credits.
13 weeks of Star Trek in one 70mm room
The 70mm room got real bookings. "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" played Town 8 in 70mm for 13 weeks starting in November 1986.
Three years later, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" held the same auditorium for 16 weeks.
Two long runs in a suburban eight-plex off a mall parking lot.
Curtains and a 70mm booth were habits carried over from the big single-screen theaters, and in 1986 a multiplex could still keep them.
Town 8 didn't have the district to itself for long.
Other multiplexes opened around Town Center as Barrett Parkway filled with retail, and AMC later built a bigger complex in the same Kennesaw market.
Eight screens stopped being a lot.
4 more screens and a new name in 1991
Five years in, Storey went back to the same building.
Four auditoriums were nearing completion in December 1991, and the expanded complex opened as Town 12 Theatre on December 20.
The screen count went from eight to 12, with four auditoriums added to the 1986 complex.
The 70mm house came through intact. "Far and Away" opened there in the format on May 22, 1992, and ran 12 weeks.
Storey was spending elsewhere in Cobb County at the same time.
In late 1991 the company bought six acres on Delk Road for a separate 10-screen theater, enlarging Kennesaw while planning a new location across the county.
Regal Town Center Stadium 16 opens in 1999
Regal had the theater by 1999 and overhauled it.
It reopened on November 19 as Regal Town Center Stadium 16: four more screens for 16 total, stadium seating in every auditorium, and the main entrance moved to the west end of the building.
One piece of the old theater survived the work.
Part of the interior treatment from the Storey 70mm auditorium was installed in the principal room of the new wing.
The finished building measured 70,600 square feet and held 2,894 seats.
AMC opened the much larger Barrett Commons the same year, and older multiplexes around Kennesaw were closing or being converted to something else.
The overhaul bought this one another two decades of showtimes.
A federal seating order, then the shutdown
Regal ran it as a first-run house for two decades.
In June 2005 the Kennesaw theater turned up in a federal consent order covering Regal's stadium-style circuit, sorted into the group of Regal locations without a nearby Regal neighbor.
Those theaters had to put ADA-required wheelchair and companion spaces in the stadium section of at least 25 percent of their auditoriums.
The order set seating rules chain-wide and made no finding against Kennesaw.
By May 2013 the listings read Regal Town Center Stadium 16 & RPX, after Regal's large-format brand. Cineworld bought Regal on February 28, 2018.
Then March 16, 2020. Regal closed for the COVID-19 shutdown, reopened for a short stretch, and sold its last tickets on September 27.
The following month the closure became permanent, ending 34 years of movie exhibition on the site.
375 apartments became 350 in one vote
The redevelopment started on paper within a year.
In 2021 PG Investco asked Cobb County to rezone the 17.9 acres for 375 apartments across seven apartment buildings, four carriage-house buildings, and four garage buildings.
The Bells Ferry Civic Association objected on density, stormwater, sewer and school capacity, floodplain conditions, and traffic.
The theater and its parking field already covered more than 70 percent of the site; the apartment plan proposed to stay under 60.
The Planning Commission held the case a month while Cobb DOT reviewed the traffic study, then recommended approval 5-0.
On November 16, 2021, the Board of Commissioners approved the rezoning 5-0, capped the project at 350 units, and held impervious surface to 60 percent.
Six weeks later the parcel sold for $13 million.
What's on the 17.9 acres now
The building outlasted the paperwork.
By summer 2025, the Regal was still standing, signage up, no tenant inside and no reuse component in the approved apartment plan.
A full-site permit application named "Presidium Matinee" was in Cobb County site-plan review by February 12, 2026, covering the same 17.9 acres with 14.8 acres proposed for disturbance.
As of August 2026, the project still hadn't reached residential occupancy.
The mall next door has had a rougher decade: two foreclosures, a January 2025 shutdown after Georgia Power cut service, and a $51.8 million sale in July 2026.
Drive past today and the 16-screen building is still there with the Regal name on it, still waiting on redevelopment.
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