Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:29:00

When a developer moved on the building in 2018, Kevin Smith played benefit shows and the neighborhood ran a thirty-hour telethon - that is how East Vancouver keeps a theatre. The Rio at 1660 East Broadway opened on April 7, 1938 with a James Cagney double bill at 25 cents a ticket, promoted as Vancouver's finest suburban theatre. The house ran films for seventy years - including spells as the Golden Princess and Golden Star serving Chinese-language audiences - until Corinne Lea took over in 2008 and began layering live music, comedy, burlesque and multimedia events onto the cinema program. The 2018 crisis defined the venue: with the building listed for sale and a developer's offer accepted, Lea mobilized a purchase campaign backed by Seth Rogen and other film-industry names, crowdfunding, and a 375,000-dollar city grant conditioned on a decade of continued cinema and live-entertainment use - and bought the building. The single-screen room holds 420 seats - about 409 in standard configuration, 582 with standing room - restored around a state-of-the-art digital projector, surround sound and a stage deep enough for touring bands. The programming is Vancouver's most eclectic: cult-classic late nights, first-run indies, sing-alongs, the city's burlesque and comedy festivals, and international touring acts from Tenacious D to First Aid Kit. The location at Broadway and Commercial - steps from the SkyTrain interchange - makes the marquee one of East Van's landmarks, and the fully accessible 1938 auditorium keeps its Art Deco character under the upgrades. Voted the city's best independent theatre, the Rio is proof of a rare civic theorem: a neighborhood that shows up for its venue gets to keep it. The 2018 purchase also made the Rio a case study cited across Canada in venue-preservation fights: a community that raised roughly three million dollars in sixty days demonstrated that cultural infrastructure can outbid redevelopment when the campaign is loud enough - and the city grant's ten-year cultural-use condition wrote the neighborhood's victory into the title deed.