NYC movie theater cancels Christmas Day screenings over burst pipe, leaving flood of customers high and dry
These Yuletide moviegoers are reeling.
City cinephiles woke up Christmas morning to the equivalent of a lump of coal: The popular Kips Bay AMC theater was partially shuttered and their movie tickets canceled because of an “unforeseen” flooding problem at the Second Avenue multiplex in Manhattan.
The theater suffered a burst pipe Monday during a screening of the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” prompting nearly 3 feet of flooding and a subsequent evacuation, an AMC employee told The Post on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately because of a busted pipe, we’re not playing any shows of ‘A Complete Unknown’ today with the exception of Imax,’” the staffer said, adding that he’s had to turn away “a lot of people” who didn’t have prepaid tickets for even that because the cinema’s computer servers are still down.
“It’s completely annoying, I know. A good chunk of the theaters are down,” the employee added. “Some theaters can only play the first show and the last show. It really depends.”
The staffer said that over the past three days, AMC workers have been borrowing neighboring theaters’ equipment “because we have to be open on Christmas, the busiest day of the year.
“You don’t know the half of it, trust me,” he said. “Everybody wants to see Bob Dylan for some reason.”
A representative for AMC Theatres did not return a Post request for comment.
The theater apparently still sold movie tickets online for its theaters affected by the closure, leaving cinema hopefuls in the dark until hours or even minutes before showtime, several AMC customers told The Post or warned on social media.
“Christmas is RUINED,” a theatergoer posted on X around 12:30 p.m., shortly after their show was nixed. “AMC Kips Bay just cancelled all our tickets.”
Sigi Nagar, 45, who came to the Kips Bay cinema Wednesday afternoon with her mom, said, “I’m highly disappointed – this is such a great movie time of year, and we book movie tickets weeks in advance, and apparently they had a hiccup in the theater – but they don’t contact you.
“I’m completely disappointed because I’m an enormous Dylan fan, and I really wanted to see the movie,” the Gramercy resident said. “We’re probably going to drive around now and feel sorry for ourselves and listen to Dylan on the radio.
“I’m Jewish, and so we go to the movies, and we eat, and that’s what we do,” she added. “This was our first choice.”
Paula Naftaly and her husband Danny came all the way from Manhasset on Long Island to enjoy lunch and a movie in the Big Apple and made it to Theater 7 on Wednesday afternoon.
But the Naftalys were in for a rude awakening when an employee at the theater informed them their screening had been cancelled because of the pipe burst and that they had to wait for the later IMAX showing.
“What are we going to do for an hour?” Paula told The Post. “We came from Long Island and had a lovely lunch in town, and we’d planned to see the 3:45 [p.m. screening], but nobody told us. There was no notification.
“I was surprised, shocked and disappointed and obviously annoyed that we weren’t notified,” she added. “Every Christmas, we have a tradition where we come in and go to a restaurant and see the movie that’s just opening. We always come to this theater.”
Bert Kimmel, 91, of the Upper East Side came to the Kips Bay multiplex Wednesday afternoon with his daughter, 57-year-old Melissa Saperstein – and the pair was hit with the same bad news.
“We’d bought the tickets in advance, even had tickets for wheelchair accessible seats,” Kimmel said, adding that his daughter was reimbursed with free passes for another showing in the future.
Saperstein said, “As lifelong New York City Jews, we are used to going to the movies on Christmas, and guess where we’re going for dinner – Chinese.
“So now we’re just waiting for our Chinese dinner, [but] we’re not hungry for it yet. We were hungry for our movie.”
