All four screens ready in Waupaca
By James Card
This past weekend was the first time the silver screens at the Rosa Theater were lit up since the Covid pandemic.
It was a soft opening to work out operational bugs and the official grand opening weekend will be Thursday through Saturday, June 15-17. There will be matinee and evening times.
The theater screened two movies on the opening test day: “Fast X” from the “Fast and Furious” franchise and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” a film based on the classic arcade game.
During the pandemic in 2020, the Rosa closed and reopened its doors temporally in September. It shut down again in November 2020 and remained closed for more than two years.
Jesse Weasner is the theater manager and he looks the part. On Monday after the soft opening weekend, he was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt while helping a repairman fix the ICEE slushie machine. They are serving freshly popped popcorn and candy snacks but do not have nachos back as of yet.
Weasner was in charge of getting the place ready for the reopening. He did a massive amount of cleaning and many small updates, including freshening up the ticket booth. All four screening rooms in the theater are ready for use.
“I’m hoping by the end of the month we will be expanding more times and eventually be showing movies seven days a week,” he said, adding that there was a big demand for Tuesday screenings. In the past they had $5 films on Tuesdays and Weasner hopes to bring that back as it was a popular family night.
The movie schedule is a work-in-progress and Weasner just added the Thursday film announcement on the outside marquee. He suggests visiting the Rogers Cinema website (www.rogerscinema.com) for movie times as they are updated.