KP Cinemas

• 180 Portage Street
• Kalamazoo, MI 49007
• (269) 360-8912
• Website

One of my favorite things to do with the boy is go to movies. I seem to have passed my love for the theater experience to him.

J and L were in Wisconsin most of last week for a figure skating camp. J’s mom had to pick B up from his day camp all week so by the time I got home at night, he had already grabbed his iPad, his VR and headed to the basement until bedtime.

I wanted to get out of the house on Saturday and Sunday for a while. He only gets four hours a day on his VR anyway so I was doing him a favor.

He had mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he wanted to see Harold and the Purple Crayon. It just so happened that the movie came out the week J and L were gone. We had some plans in the afternoon on Saturday so I grabbed B and we went to the 11:00 AM show.

I chose KP Cinemas this time because we haven’t been there yet.

KP Cinemas is on the corner of Portage Street and South Street in the southern part of Kalamazoo’s Central Business District. This notorious theater was first a Rave Motion Picture, then the super popular Alamo Drafthouse that was kicked out to make way for an AMC. The theater sat dark a couple of years before a local group bought it and reopened it as an independent theater.

It was a Saturday morning so I parked right across South Street at one of the meters in front of WMed. If that’s not an option, the Kalamazoo Mall parking ramp is right around the corner on Portage Street and it’s free for 90 minutes. After that, they offer validation for 50%. You really have no reason to complain about parking at this theater. If you need to have a massive surface lot three feet from the door, that’s on you and you really do need to rethink things. I’m going to harp on this a couple of more times. Parking is not a reason to not go to this theater.

If you went to a movie when this was the AMC Portage 10, the theater is going to look very similar. The entryway has a large ticket office for those busy nights but, again, we were there at 11:00 on a Saturday morning so the signs pointed us to the concession stand to purchase tickets.

The lobby area is huge and, again, not really changed all the much from the AMC days. There’s a large sitting area off to one side if you’re waiting for other people to arrive and need to relax a bit.

The concession area is straight in as you walk through the doors. the thing that really made the previous two theaters in this location unique was the food. It was more than popcorn and candy. KP doesn’t have quite the extensive menu that the previous theaters had. They do have some hot food but it’s more appetizers type stuff. Fried pickles, chicken tenders, mac and cheese bits. Those kind of things. We passed on all that and each got a medium popcorn plus a large drink for me and a medium icee for B. B also grabbed a box of candy which I almost didn’t notice but luckily he put it on the counter so we didn’t walk off without paying for it. The tickets to the matinee, popcorn, drinks and candy came out to just under $50.

The popcorn is filled behind the counter but drinks are self serve off to the side right before you head back to the auditoriums. There are several Pepsi machines and an Icee machine. We filled up our drinks then headed to find out theater.

B commented on it several times and he was totally right, this place is huge. Again, that’s not changed from any of the previous theaters that were here. They’ve all been huge. It’s a big footprint for the theater. Even the hallway to get back to the auditoriums is pretty long. That’s because there are auditoriums behind the walls on either side so they need the space.

There are ten screens in this building. When you get to the end of the hallway, there are five to the right and five to the left.

We were in Theater 9 all the way at the end of the hallway. Each theater has a TV screen with the movie name and start time so you make it in to the right door.

I actually timed this really well for once. B is always mad at me because we get to the theater 30 minutes before the movie starts. This time, it was just ten minutes before so the Noovie stuff had already started.

The theater, again, has the same layouts as the AMC before it. There aren’t a lot of rows in each auditorium and there is a lot of space between each row. Some of this design is left over from the Alamo Drafthouse days as the rows were all widened quite a bit when they put in tables and made room for wait staff to walk around.

The seats are all recliners which made B really happy. I always kept him away from Celebration Cinemas because of the price but J brought him there once and he loved the recliners. He was bummed we weren’t going to Celebration for this movie but he was super happy when we got in the theater and he saw the red leather recliners.

Other than it being nice to recline while watching a movie, I love these seats because they’re bigger than a typical theater seat. There’s a nice big cup holder on arm and I’m not constantly trying to find the little plastic ring in the dark to set my drink in.

Like I said, I timed it out really well and we didn’t have to wait long for the previews to start. We got settled in our seats with the popcorn and watched a few minutes of Maria Menounos then previews started pretty quickly.

We never read Harold and the Purple Crayon books to either of our kids but B somehow knew about the story and was really excited to see it. The movie was fun. It’s a pretty typical kids movie but it was cute and he really liked and stayed engaged I enjoyed the ridiculousness of it so it really turned in a great morning activity.

I’m going to harp on this again in closing, don’t not go to KP Cinemas because “parking is awful.” It’s not. I know a lot of people still harbor a lot of ill will towards what happened with Alamo Drafthouse but that was seven years ago. It’s time to get over it and realize it’s not coming back. KP Cinemas is a great theater in the heart of downtown Kalamazoo. It’s a little bit cheaper than Celebration Cinemas (but a little more expensive than Kalamazoo 10) and has a lot of the same great features. B loved it and asked if we could go see all movies we go to at KP. I told him we’ll still go to the Goodrich theaters from time to time because the price is usually better but we will definitely go to more movies downtown.