Columbia’s Phoenix Theatres Shows Final Flick

COLUMBIA, MD — Howard County moviegoers now have just one option in Columbia to catch the latest flick on the big screen.

The Phoenix Theatres announced on its website that the Columbia Snowden 14 + ScreenX movie theater closed for good Monday, only eight months after reopening. The company stated on its website that they would be closing permanently as of Jan. 5. The theater was previously owned by Cinemark and before that, Regal Cinema, which closed the theater under its name in July 2023.

That leaves the AMC 14 Columbia theater at The Mall in Columbia as the only movie theater remaining in Howard County. There are movie theaters in nearby Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties.

The site where the movie theater sits will become a warehouse. Sterling Logistics Properties, a subsidiary of Florida-based real estate investment private equity firm Sterling Organization, announced in March that it had bought the 11-acre property. According to the company’s website, it plans to redevelop the space into a 189,267-square-foot warehouse facility, including 44 loading docks, a 36-foot clear height, a 4,000-amp heavy power feed and a speculative dock package and office space. The company's goal is to buy primarily vacant, freestanding retail buildings and redevelop them into Neighborhood Fulfillment Centers.

“We’re thrilled about this acquisition,” Joe Dykstra, president of Sterling Logistics Properties, said in a March news release. “We believe that the site’s strategic location along the supply chain-critical I-95 corridor makes it an ideal setting for a Neighborhood Fulfillment Center, with access to nearly 10 million people within a one-hour drive across the Washington, D.C. MSA. We look forward to developing a brand-new, 185,000-square-foot, Class A, institutional-quality warehouse to meet the growing demand for efficient logistics infrastructure."