On Dec. 29, 2025, the news was bleak for movie theaters.
“The Movie Theater Comeback That Wasn’t: Why 2025 Was Such a Dud for Struggling Cinemas” a Variety headline announced; “Even ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ can’t lift the 2025 box office out of pandemic-crisis doldrums,” the Los Angeles Times lamented.
Ticket to ride
To see a film in the nation’s first Dolby Vision+Atmos auditorium—located in Downtown Centre Cinemas—visit themovieexperience.com, choose your show and seats, and buy a ticket online. Be sure to choose the correct screening. Only one of the seven screens is equipped with Vision+Atmos.
It’s true that so far, nothing theater operators have tried has lifted attendance to pre-2020 levels. Between well-programmed streaming services, people falling out of the theatergoing habit, and increasingly good home theater equipment and falling prices for massive flatscreen TVs, people have plenty of reasons not to patronize movie theaters.
It also doesn’t help that the window between films being screened in theaters and then showing up on streaming services has been greatly reduced. Why go to a theater if you can watch that very same film in the comfort of your home in three weeks?
Well, local theater proprietor Bruce Sanborn—who a little more than a year ago signed a new 20-year lease for his seven-plex in the Downtown Centre and is one year into a two-year, $3 million-plus renovation of the now 31-year-old theater—is betting on new state-of-the-art technology to draw people in.
“We want to get folks out of their houses and back into the theater, and I guess if we can’t get them back with this, we’ll never get them back,” he said during a Dec. 18 demonstration of the nation’s first Dolby Vision+Atmos auditorium. “A lot of SLO County doesn’t come downtown to go to the movies. This is our effort to bring them back to the movie theater to see a movie the way people have for 100 years—in a dark room with other people sitting around them. That’s our goal.”
The technology is so new and rare that there are only 13 Dolby Vision+Atmos auditoriums in the world.
Sanborn has been renovating Downtown Centre Cinemas room by room, and the new Vision+Atmos auditorium is the fifth room. It opened Christmas Day. When renovations are complete, four theaters will be equipped with the Atmos, which uses multiple speakers located around the auditorium to allow sounds to literally travel around viewers. Three will have Dolby’s immersive 7.1 system. Comfortable new recliners with heated seats will be installed throughout.
Credit: FILE PHOTO BY KAREN GARCIA
“After this [auditorium] is the lobby, the restrooms, and of course there are two theaters to finish near the lobby,” Sanborn said. “We also want to improve the outside.” He envisions a lounge feel in the lobby with comfy couches where people might enjoy a glass of wine before or after a screening.
The real star of the renovation, however, is the Vision+Atmos technology, which is a gamechanger. The new auditorium is completely black: walls, ceiling, floor, and seats. Dolby Vision technology depends on an ultra-dark environment. Even the exit lights have been located so that no light reflects on-screen.
“It’s only fitting that we do this with Bruce Sanborn and his family and The Movie Experience because his family is theatrical royalty in Southern California,” Dolby exec Mike Archer explained during the demo. “Starting from the very beginning, they were always looking for that next best thing in their theaters, and still today they’re committed to bringing the absolute best technology that you can get in an auditorium, and that’s Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.”
The contrast ratio is greater than a million to one, the very limit that the human eye can perceive. A standard movie screen generates 14 Lamperts of light, but Dolby Vision generates 31 Lamperts. That brighter screen and contrast ratio means darker darks and brighter lights. The technology generates amazingly crisp detail and three-times the eye-popping color gamut as a standard movie.
Both technologies are applied to films in post-production, so any movie can be transformed to screen in a Vision+Atmos theater.
“At Dolby, we’ve been around for 60 years,” Archer explained. “We don’t come up with solutions and technologies and tell the creatives they need it. The success of Dolby for 60 years has been working with the creatives and understanding what they’re trying to achieve with their filmmaking and creating the tools that allow them to do that.”
One Dolby fan is Titanic filmmaker James Cameron, who in a YouTube video sang Dolby’s praises: “In Dolby, you’re going to see it in a format that’s going to draw you in. With Dolby Atmos, it’s going to sound the best it can sound. There’s so much special dimensionality to it. The extra vertical dimension is wonderful to mix with. Things going overhead. Things going around you. Things happening behind you. Everything will still have clarity. It just enrichens the entire experience so much.
“Dolby Vision makes it a much more vivid experience,” Cameron continued. “That vividness draws you in and engages you, but it also makes the emotional dramatic scenes that much more vivid, so you feel more deeply. It’s got the full dynamic range—the brightness, the color—and when you’ve got dynamic range, you experience the color space better.”
And SLO Town now has the very first Vision+Atmos theater in the nation.
“I just wish there were thousands more Dolby Vision screens in the world,” Cameron added. “It’s really important to see Fire and Ash in a Dolby cinema because it’s the place I go to see my movie looking the right way. You can see it the way it was meant to be seen. It’s the way we authored the movie to look. Audiences will be thunderstruck. If I didn’t think that, it wouldn’t be worth it.”
Seeing a film in Vision+Atmos will cost more. An adult ticket is $19, while kids, seniors, and the military will pay $16 compared to $15 and $12 in Downtown Centre’s other auditoriums. There are matinee discounts, too.
“It’s not inexpensive,” Archer stressed. “You generally see a higher ticket price associated with it because you have to have a return on your investment. About 55 to 60 films come out every year with Vision+Atmos, so the patrons here could come every week and see a new film in Vision+Atmos. Animation really gets the benefits of high dynamic range.”
After attending the Dec. 18 demo, I watched Avatar: Fire and Ash on Dec. 26.
While I found the third film in the Avatar franchise derivative and unnecessarily long, watching it was a remarkably immersive experience. Sound swirled around me, the colors were incredibly vivid, and the sharpness of the picture was astounding. I felt like was inside the movie. Amazing! ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Volunteers 2026.