The Sunrise Theater Nearly Closed in the 1980s. That's Why Its Fall Lineup Looks Like This.

Walk into the Sunrise on a Tuesday night and the first thing you notice isn't the movie poster. It's the wine list. A volunteer greets you at the door, someone announces the evening's other happenings before the lights go down, and somewhere near the concession stand there's a flyer for a bluegrass act you didn't expect to see booked in a 361-seat room on Broad Street. That contrast, an old single-screen movie house pouring beer and wine while it books national touring acts, isn't an accident of small-town charm. It's the direct result of who owns the building, and that story goes back further than most people walking in for a Tuesday showing realize.

A Hardware Store, Then a Movie House, Then Almost Nothing

The building at 250 NW Broad Street started life in 1898 as the S.S. Thomas Hardware store. It didn't become a theater until decades later, when it opened as the Sunrise on September 23, 1941, with a screening of Joel McCrea in "Reaching for the Sun." By December 1944 it had been absorbed into the Stewart & Everett Theatres chain, and it ran as a conventional movie house for the better part of forty years.

Then it didn't. The theater closed in the early 1980s as chain-run single-screen houses lost ground across the country, and for a stretch, downtown Southern Pines had a dark storefront where its movie theater used to be.

The Rescue That Changed Who's in Charge

What brought the building back wasn't a developer or a new operator buying in. It was the Arts Council of Moore County and the Sandhills Little Theater rallying enough community support to restore the space, reopening it as a performing arts center under the Arts Council's ownership. That was the first handoff.

The second came in 1998, when day-to-day operations transferred to a dedicated nonprofit built specifically for the job: the Sunrise Preservation Group. The third came in 2005, when ownership of the building itself followed, putting the walls and the programming under the same roof for the first time since the theater went dark.

That's the detail worth sitting with. It took roughly two decades to go from "closed for good" to "owned outright by the nonprofit that runs it." Most small-town theaters that survive do so as tenants, leasing a stage from a landlord who has to see a return on that space regardless of what's showing. The Sunrise isn't a tenant. It's the landlord and the program director in the same 501(c)(3), with no separate ownership expecting rent.

What Owning the Building Outright Buys You

That structure changes what a booking calendar can look like. A theater that has to make weekly rent pencil out tends to book conservatively: whatever fills the most seats, repeated often. A theater that owns its walls debt-free can treat a Thursday bluegrass show and a Sunday afternoon opera broadcast as two different ways of serving the same mission, rather than two competing bets on the same balance sheet.

That's a meaningful part of why the Sunrise's calendar reads the way it does. Alongside first-run and independent film, the theater runs live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and the Bolshoi Ballet in cinema, hosts community theater, and books touring musicians on what it calls the Kimberly Stage, a performance space built into what used to be a single-screen movie house. This summer that stage hosted country singer-songwriter Phil Vassar as part of the Moore Celebrates America's 250 concert, with the Chris Nelson Band opening. The current season roster also lists acts like Jason Scott & The High Heat and a Jesse Garron tribute to Elvis alongside the touring dates already on the calendar. That's a wide range for a room this size, and it's the kind of range a commercial single-screen theater in a market this compact usually can't afford to take a chance on.

The beer and wine service fits the same logic. It's not a gimmick borrowed from bigger multiplexes. It's a revenue line a nonprofit that owns its building can lean on to help fund programming that ticket sales alone wouldn't cover, whether that's a $9 matinee or a touring bluegrass act that costs more to book than a small room can recoup on tickets alone.

What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall

If you're deciding what to put on your own calendar between now and the end of the year, here's what's confirmed:

• September 19 – Tell Me Lies, 7:30 PM
• October 23 – Keller Williams, on the Kimberly Stage, 6:00 PM
• November 6 – Fireside Collective, 5:00 PM
• November 13 – Chatham Rabbits, 7:30 PM

That's four touring acts across four genres, bluegrass to folk to rock, in a room built for 361 people. None of that is unusual for a city with a dedicated concert venue and a marketing budget to match. It is unusual for a converted hardware store on Broad Street with a volunteer greeter and a wine list.

The Gala That's Still Paying For This

Ownership without debt doesn't mean the theater runs on autopilot. The Sunrise Preservation Group still leans on its own fundraising to keep the lights on and the calendar full, and one of its signature events makes that dependency explicit. The theater's 1941 Charity Gala, held at the Fair Barn in Pinehurst and catered by Elliot's, is built around the same origin story as the building itself, an evening styled after the era the theater first opened in, with proceeds going toward what the organization describes as its continued preservation and programming. Tickets run $150 a person, with tables of eight available for group sponsorship.

That's the part of the mechanism that's easy to miss walking in for a Tuesday movie. The theater owning its own building solved one problem, the risk of a landlord pricing it out. It didn't solve the other one, which is that a 361-seat nonprofit venue in a town this size still needs its neighbors to show up for more than the price of a ticket if it wants to keep booking acts like these.

Why This Matters If You Already Live Here

None of this changes what showing up on a Tuesday night feels like. You'll still get a volunteer at the door, a glass of wine before the lights go down, and a good chance the flyer by the concession stand points you toward something you wouldn't have found on your own. What changes is understanding why that's even possible in a building this size in a town this size. The Sunrise isn't competing with a megaplex on ticket price or seat count. It's running on a model where the people who show up are also, in a real sense, the ones keeping the doors open, gala ticket by gala ticket, wine pour by wine pour.

If you've been meaning to catch one of the fall shows, the theater's own site keeps the current schedule and ticketing links. And if the building's history is the kind of thing that makes you want to know more about what else has quietly shaped downtown Southern Pines, Cinema Treasures has the fuller record of the Sunrise's ninety-some years on Broad Street.

Southern Pines has a way of surfacing stories like this once you start asking who actually owns the places you walk past. If you're curious about the neighborhood beyond a Tuesday night at the movies, Ross Laton has spent decades getting to know Moore County from the inside, one landmark and one gate at a time. Let's Connect.