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planning and building.” With exaltations such
as these still fresh in the minds of filmgoers,
Mid City’s role as Hoyts next inductee was an
unenviable one.
It was a transformative time in Melbourne
cinema. There was no going back to the large
and usually ornate, single-screen venues that
had hitherto been the hallmark of Melbourne’s
cinema landscape. The combined five screens
of Cinema Centre and Mid City effectively
replaced single screens at the following five
city cinemas: Regent, Plaza, Athenaeum (all
Collins Street), Esquire and Paris (former
Lyceum) in Bourke Street. The transition was
somewhat gradual, particularly in respect of
the Athenaeum and Esquire which continued
on gallantly until their 1975 leases were not
renewed.

This evolutionary aspect of cinema design has
been discussed in Heritage Reviews of both
the Cinema Centre and Mid City. The
transformation to purpose-built, multi-screen
venues was considered a significant
revitalisation of the cinema industry, perhaps
the greatest since the advent of talkies four
decades earlier. Melbourne Herald columnist,
Stephanie Thompson, wrote in November
Cinema 5, with its distinctly curved screen, was the largest of the Mid City cinemas.
1970 that “sixty per cent of box office takings
The off-form concrete finish was fashionable of the Cinema Centre as the most exciting come from patrons aged between 18 and 30.
at the time of Mid City’s design. The event in Hoyts 60-year history. A souvenir Thus, cinemas need to accommodate this age
trowelled-on aggregate finish is complemented brochure of the Cinema Centre opening demographic first and foremost” and “the
by the strident red oxide, front and back, proudly hails the arrival of “the largest cinema grandeur of the Regent Theatre, whilst fine for
applied to the building. This presents a stark complex ever built in The Southern Gone With the Wind, does not quite fit in with
contrast to the natural concrete colour of the Hemisphere.” In June 1969, Film Weekly states the new style, low budget Easy Rider type of
side walls. Two deep beam pairs support the that “Hoyts Theatres $4.5 million Cinema films.”
Bourke Street awning, thus accentuating the Centre was the culmination of four years
muscular design of the façade.

A 2012 report of the Future Melbourne
(Planning) Committee notes that although Mid
City is more decorative than functional in its
use of bold geometric forms, “Mid City was
an early (if not the earliest) large scale
commercial design to utilise the now familiar
splayed and chamfered forms.”

Also worthy of note is a clever carpark
entrance at the Little Bourke Street end of the
building, which takes the form of a decline
from street level. In character with the era,
there was once a yellow bubble space-age
cashier’s office at the carpark entrance. A
similar feature was also present at the Total
Carpark on Russell Street.
The timing of the new Mid City Cinemas is
pertinent. In 1969, Hoyts opened its 3-screen
flagship Cinema Centre complex at
140 Bourke Street, just one block away. In
doing so, Hoyts clearly signalled its resolve to
make Bourke Street, not Collins Street, the
core of its city presence. The visage of Little
Bourke Street was about to change too.
Chinatown entrepreneur and City Councillor,
David Neng-Hsiang Wang, persuaded the
Melbourne City Council to undertake a
significant redevelopment of the Little Bourke
Street area.

Hoyts then managing director, Dale Turnbull,
is reported in Film Weekly, 17 April 1969, as
describing the simultaneous 3-screen opening

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