Ticket price
$1
50 cents Mondays
2 for 1 Tuesdays

Payment
Cash

Smoking
No

Parking
Lot

Related links
• Official site

Wheelchair
accessible?
Yes

Box office
214-691-8240

Seating
• All seats have cup holders
• Total capacity is 950

The Medallion Theater, once one of the highest-grossing movie houses in the country, is no more.

A Dec. 30 closing was announced for the venerable theater, located at Northwest Highway and Skillman Street, and a Christmas Day festival of free screenings had been planned. But staffers arrived at the theater on Dec. 13 to discover that owners of the Medallion Shopping Center had closed the theater 17 days earlier than expected.

Before closing Thursday, Dec. 13, it was a five-screen multiplex. But when it opened in 1969 with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it quickly established itself as a premium single-screen theater.

For the next decade, it remained one of Dallas' landmark theaters, with exclusive showings of The Godfather, Love Story, The Sting, M*A*S*H, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Steven Spielberg considered the Medallion his "good-luck theater." In 1975, his breakthrough hit Jaws was given a sneak preview there.

"That was where I heard the first screams caused by watching Jaws, and it was music to my ears," the director told The Dallas Morning News.

For several years, he insisted that his films, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the unsuccessful 1941, be sneaked at the Medallion.

Several factors led to the single-screen theater becoming a five-plex. By the early 1980s, large pockets of moviegoers had moved north and business had declined. Multiplexing the 900-seat building seemed commercially viable.

Recently, the Medallion 5 had gained a following under the management of George Jones, who booked the theater with a variety of repertory films, music, festivals, live theater, and art.