Being an east-sider, I’ve never had the occasion (or need) to head up north to Yishun to watch a movie at Yishun 10. What I didn’t realise was that Yishun 10 was Singapore’s first multiplex cinema and it is now closed for extensive renovations before reopening at the end of the year.

Well, it’s not really true to say that Yishun 10 was the first multiplex cinema – other smaller cinema theatres usually had two or three screens to present different movies at the same time. What cineplexes like Yishun 10 represented was a revolution in the way Singaporeans spent their recreation time. Since older cinema theatres were purpose-built buildings, there wasn’t anything much you could do after the movie. Yishun 10 was sort of a game-changer in the way that, more than ever before, the cinema patron had more choice than ever about the kinds of shows they want to watch – and more importantly, since most multiplex cinemas were located in shopping malls, patrons could literally spend their whole day at a shopping mall without the need to go elsewhere. Little wonder then, that during the 1990s we saw a flurry of cinema-cum-shopping malls sprout up in an effort to capture patron’s time of day.

But back to Yishun 10. Jerome writes:

I know that GV Yishun had turned a little grimy of late, but when it opened in May 1992, it represented a landmark in the cinema industry here in Singapore, being Singapore’s (and probably Asia’s) very first multiplex (somehow we refer to these as a cineplex these days). When the idea was conceived, Singapore had been dominated by the single screen cinemas of old, where everything was run very much in the old scheme of things. Tickets were bought over the counter at the Box Office, and seats were manually assigned, with patrons selecting them from a laminated cardboard plan at the counter and the Box Office clerk would then scribble the seat numbers onto the tickets with a chinagraph. The appearance of Yishun 10, looking as if it was a rocket ship that had dropped out of the sky onto the newly developed Yishun New Town (it was designed to look like a rocket ship that had landed in Yishun by the architect, Mr. Geoff Melone), changed all that, also bringing with it some futuristic concepts which included computerised ticketing that we now take for granted.

You can read the rest of Jerome’s post here.