With World Golf Village’s future in question, the nonprofit organization that runs the St. Augustine Amphitheater and Ponte Vedra Concert Hall is proposing its own plan to take over the popular IMAX Theater.

St. Johns County Cultural Events Inc. took over operations for the two St. Johns County venues in 2023. Now the organization is proposing a plan that would convert the IMAX Theater into a community theater and event space. 

The World Golf Foundation unexpectedly closed the IMAX Theater last month. Jerry Wilson, who sits on the nonprofit’s board of directors, suggested that St. Johns County could reinvent the theater space. 

The proposal from St. Johns County Cultural Events calls for putting in a standard theater screen, purchasing a cheaper, standard projector and turning it into “a multiuse community theater.” 

The plan would be to keep the theater open seven days a week, with different themes each day — family movies on the weekends, Wilson said, and other programming like classic films on Mondays and first-run movies on Thursdays and Fridays. 

Wilson pointed out that moving away from being an IMAX Theater would keep the theater from competing with the new Epic Theatres location that recently opened in St. Augustine — and has IMAX screens of its own.

The plan, Wilson said, could be done the same way the county works with the organization for the amphitheater and concert hall — through a public-private partnership. 

“The beauty of this is that St. Johns County retains ownership of the venue,” Wilson told the Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday.

St. Johns County Cultural Events “would become the operators of the community theater, and given the unknown future of the village, we would not be looking at some long-term agreement,” Wilson said. “We would just operate it as is in our public-private partnership framework that we operate today.”

The idea is still in the early stages, and Wilson was not able to share a cost breakdown during the Board of County Commissioners meeting. The County Commission was overwhelmingly in support of the idea.

Chair Krista Joseph, who expressed support for the project, did say she was frustrated that the county did not accept a similar proposal when Sun-Ray Cinema said it wanted to take over the theater last year.

County staff will work with St. Johns County Cultural Events to determine what the costs and details of its proposal would be.

What about World Golf Village?

If there’s a potential future for the IMAX taking shape, the same can’t be said for the 37 acres of property St. Johns County previously said it would purchase at the village. 

County staff informed the County Commission that the World Golf Village properties were built with conditions that restrict development to be related to golf courses, sports medicine, a theater and other “similar entertainment” facilities. 

The developer that built World Golf Village could remove those restrictions, Economic Development Director Sara Maxfield explained, but developer SJIT LAND is hesitant to go along with the change.

Maxfield said the developer doesn’t want to be compelled to pay for roughly $18 million in road improvements on a much tighter schedule than originally planned. 

The county was set on spending $5.5 million to purchase property at World Golf Village last year, but with the property’s complications in mind, some on the County Commission are uncertain. 

County Commissioner Christian Whitehurst called it a “rat’s nest,” and Joseph called the situation “a disaster.”

Still, county officials argued that the purchasing the property might be the only way to keep World Golf Village from being the home of a new apartment complex.

“(The) fear — which is the fear all over this county — is that if we leave it to the free market, which God bless the free market, but, you know what’s going to go in there is multifamily,” Whitehurst said. “That’s what the free market wants.”

Even though the county spent more than a year conducting surveys and town hall discussions about the future of World Golf Village, the county may conduct more hearings for the public to figure out the property’s future. 

County Commissioner Sarah Arnold said she wants to see the county’s staff continue negotiating with developer SJIT LAND to lift the land use restrictions “at least for what the county currently owns,” and for county staff to find a way forward where the developer still covers the cost of road improvements near World Golf Village.