Ocean City’s Moorlyn Theatre to show movies again

After years of famine, the movie-theater gods continue to be good to the Jersey Shore.

The defunct but historic Moorlyn 4 Theatre on the Ocean City boardwalk has been purchased for $1.35 million by Town Square Entertainment, owners of the restored Ventnor Square Theatre, the Tilton Square Theater, the Harbor Square Theater in Stone Harbor, and the under-construction Cape Square entertainment complex in Rio Grande.

Unlike the Ventnor and Stone Harbor theaters, the restored Moorlyn will not have a restaurant and, as Ocean City is a dry town, will not replicate the successful and lively bars at those locations.

But assuming the renovations don’t go beyond some needed roof repairs and a plush interior makeover, owner Brett DeNafo says the theater could be open as early as this summer.

“We’re just going to make it into an old-school movie theater,” said DeNafo, who with partners Clint Bunting and Scot Kaufman have made it a mission to revive the old Shore movie-going tradition, which had been all but lost as theaters were closed and others allowed to decay under absentee ownership. “Ocean City deserves a movie theater. It’s America ‘s number one family resort and you don’t have a movie theater.”

DeNafo said his company had attempted to purchase the building in 2018 from the Ocean City Tabernacle, but the price was too high. George’s Candies purchased the building with a development plan but was unable to get necessary approvals, he said. Another buyer stepped in and tried to turn the building into a gym but also was unable to put his plan in motion, and the building became available again.

The sale was finalized Wednesday, DeNafo said.

“The Moorlyn has long been a dream project for us due to its incredibly rich history in serving Ocean City and surrounding community with entertainment since the early 1900s,” Town Square wrote on Facebook. “The building has survived hurricanes, super storms, neglect, and even a 200 foot move to the east after the `Great Boardwalk Fire of 1927.’”

DeNafo said that despite the pandemic lockdown that began with him unsuccessfully trying to defy state orders and keep his Tilton Square theater open (with a new air-filtration system) and continued with booms in streaming, the movie-going customer has since returned to the theaters.

“The whole streaming way of doing things is not working,” DeNafo said. “This was the best summer we ever had. Top Gun was amazing.”

He said the Tilton Square theater is the number-one theater in South Jersey, and this summer, during one rainy week in July, the chain as a whole was the ninth best on the East Coast. That success has allowed him to show a wide range of movies, including box-office hits like Wakanda Forever and more obscure offerings for South Jersey, like the Japanese anime blockbuster One Piece Film: Red, the number-one film in Japan.

The Moorlyn, located on the boardwalk at Moorlyn Terrace between Eighth and Ninth Streets, opened as a bowling alley in 1905, according to the website Cinema Treasures, and became a 1,600-seat theater in 1922. It was subsequently divided into two, then four, theaters.

In 1989, it was bought by Frank Theatres, which operated a chain of movie theaters in Shore towns. The Frank family closed the Moorlyn in February 2018 and it was put up for sale.