Christmas movie fans are upset.
City moviegoers woke up on Christmas morning to the equivalent of a lump of coal. The popular Kips Bay AMC theater has been partially closed and movie tickets canceled due to “unexpected” flooding issues at Manhattan's Second Avenue multiplex.
A pipe burst at the theater during a showing of the Bob Dylan biopic “Completely Unknown” on Monday, causing about 3 feet of flooding and subsequent evacuations, an AMC employee told The Post on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, due to a broken pipe, there will be no shows of 'Complete Unknown' today, except on IMAX,” the staffer said, adding that they had to turn away “many people” who weren't watching. Ta. There aren't even prepaid tickets for that because the movie theater's computer servers are still down.
“It's a complete nuisance, I know. Quite a few theaters are closed,” the employee added. “Some theaters can only show the first show and the last show. It really depends.”
AMC employees have been renting equipment from a nearby theater for the past three days, according to staffers. “We have to be open during Christmas, which is the busiest time of the year.”
“You don’t know the half of it, believe me,” he said. “Everyone wants to meet Bob Dylan for some reason.”
A representative for AMC Theaters did not respond to The Post's request for comment.
Several AMC customers told the Post and warned on social media that the theater is still selling movie tickets online for theaters affected by the closures, and that the theater is still selling movie tickets online for theaters affected by the closure. The show remains in the dark for hours, sometimes even minutes, before showtime.
“Christmas is ruined,” one theatergoer posted on X around 12:30 p.m., shortly after the performance was cancelled. “AMC Kips Bay has canceled all of our tickets.”
said Sigi Nagar, 45, who came to the Kips Bay cinema with her mother on Wednesday afternoon. There was a hiccup at the theater, but I haven't heard back from you.
“It's totally disappointing because I'm a huge Dylan fan and I really wanted to see the movie,” the Gramercy resident said. “We're probably going to be driving around now feeling sorry for ourselves and listening to Dylan on the radio.
“I'm Jewish, so we go to the movies, we go out to eat, that's what we do,” she added. “This was our first choice.”
Paula Naftaly and her husband, Danny, arrived at Theater 7 on Wednesday afternoon, having come all the way from Manhasset, Long Island, to enjoy lunch and a movie in the Big Apple.
But the Naftalis were in for a bad awakening when a theater employee informed them that the screening had been canceled due to a burst pipe and that they would have to wait for a later IMAX screening.
“What am I going to do for an hour?” Paula told the Post. “We were coming from Long Island and planned on having a nice lunch in town and seeing the 3:45 show.” [p.m. screening]but no one told me. There was no notification.
“I was surprised, shocked, disappointed and obviously frustrated that I wasn't notified,” she added. “Every Christmas, it's a tradition for us to go to a restaurant and watch the movie that just started. We always come to this theater.”
Burt Kimmel, 91, of the Upper East Side, arrived at the Kips Bay multiplex with his daughter Melissa Saperstein, 57, on Wednesday afternoon, and they both received the same bad news. Ta.
“We had purchased tickets in advance and had tickets for wheelchair-accessible seating,” Kimmel said, adding that her daughter was reimbursed with a free pass for another screening in the future. Ta.
“As lifelong New York City Jews, we're used to going to the movies on Christmas and second-guessing where we're going to have dinner, and that's Chinese,” Saperstein said.
“So now we just have to wait for the Chinese dinner. [but] We're not hungry for it yet. We were hungry for our own movies. ”
