First look: New AMC dine-in theater in Hackensack

The Saks Fifth Avenue store at The Shops at Riverside, once the ultimate destination for designer gowns, furs and other luxuries, is now home to a movie theater that the mall hopes will be the ultimate in upscale entertainment.

A movie theater that AMC, the operator, is calling its first "ultra lux" theater in the country opens Wednesday.

The second floor of the former Saks space, once home to haute couture, now is occupied by a gleaming lobby, a bar serving signature cocktails, a counter for hot food orders, and nine viewing rooms with big screens, reclining seats, and servers who will deliver meals to moviegoers.

AMC, in designing the theater, said it wanted to create the feel of a luxury hotel, with elegant lobby seating and a chandelier. The Saks space is the first time AMC has been given a blank canvas to create a theater, rather than refurbishing an existing AMC theater, as it did when it remodeled its theaters in Bridgewater, Menlo Park and West Orange.

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"Traditionally what we do is we go into an older asset, we take the seats out, we put our recliners in, we put in our MacGuffins bar, but we're stuck with the same shell, so it doesn't allow us the opportunity to do something like this," AMC spokesman Ryan Noonan said.

The look of the theater, Noonan said, reflects the vision AMC Chief Executive Adam Aron had for the company's upscale theaters. Aron wanted the theater to hark back to the Hollywood era, when movie theaters were built like palaces, "with the wide open spaces and the fine finishes and the chandelier lobby," Noonan said.

AMC also has a 16-screen multiplex less than 3 miles away, at Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus. The company believes the new theater won't steal business from their Paramus location, but will attract new patrons looking for a nicer movie experience. 

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Upscale movie theaters, with bar and dining options, are the hottest trend in movie construction. The iPic theater in Fort Lee offers similar amenities, and another luxury theater is planned in Closter.

Ticket prices at the Riverside theater will range from $14.42 for matinees to $16.02 for evening shows.

The movie theater occupies about 44,000 square feet of the former Saks department store, the entire second level of the store. The other half of the store, on the first level, now houses the relocated Cheesecake Factory restaurant and will also be used for new boutiques and specialty stores. 

The AMC theater is part of a plan to revitalize the mall and restore its image as North Jersey's premier luxury shopping center. It also helps bring Riverside into the new age of shopping, when entertainment venues and restaurants are more coveted tenants than department stores and fashion retailers.

The 1,000-seat theater has the potential to bring several thousand moviegoers to the mall on busy days, and Riverside is hoping a good number of those will also shop in its stores or dine at its restaurants.

Patrons can order cocktails, beer or wine at the MacGuffins bar and either drink them before the show in the armchairs and plush seats in the lobby or take them into the movie. AMC names the bars in its dine-in theaters MacGuffins in homage to the term Alfred Hitchcock coined for the plot devices that move the movies along, like the falcon statute in "The Maltese Falcon."

They also can order everything from snacks to full meals like gourmet burgers, flatbread pizzas or an Asian steak and shrimp rice bowl. "It's appetizers. It's entrees. It's desserts, milkshakes," Noonan said.

Customers buy reserved tickets for specific seats, and when they order food to be delivered, they give the server their seat number. The seats are spaced far enough apart to allow servers to walk in the rows to deliver food.

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Noonan said most food typically is delivered before the movie starts, while the previews are playing. The dine-in concept lets busy parents and other time-pressed moviegoers do dinner and a movie in two hours rather than four because they can eat while they watch.

The theater, on its opening day Wednesday, will be showing the hit horror film "It," along with "Baby Driver," "Dunkirk," "Girls Trip," "The Hitman's Bodyguard," "Spiderman Homecoming" and "Wonder Woman." 

The sizes of the nine screening rooms range from 44 to 206 seats, so AMC can show the blockbusters in the larger rooms and films that may be past their peak in the smaller rooms.