Brian Le was just driving through Foothill Ranch Towne Centre when he saw the tractors. He pulled over, took a few photos, and posted them to Patch. The building they were tearing into had been the Regal, then briefly the Cinemark, and for more than a year before that, nothing at all: dark windows, a parking lot with no reason to fill up, a marquee with no letters on it. Le told Patch he had "mixed feelings" about watching it come down. He and his wife used to go there before the pandemic, back when it was close, convenient, and almost always had good seats.

What's replacing it has been public knowledge in Lake Forest for over a year. What hasn't gotten as much attention is how long it actually took to get from "everyone agrees this should happen" to an excavator on site. That gap says something about how development moves in this city, even when the fight over an issue is already mostly settled.

A theater that didn't fade so much as get sold out from under it

The easy story is streaming killed another multiplex. That's not quite what happened here. The Foothill Ranch location opened in September 1999 as one of the first Regal theaters in Orange County. It closed on July 26, 2023, and instead of staying dark, it reopened less than a week later, on August 1, 2023, under Cinemark. That reopening lasted just over a year. The theater closed for good on September 12, 2024, and the building was sold by that November.

In other words, the theater wasn't slowly bleeding customers until it gave up. It was operating, then it wasn't, on a timeline that tracks a change in ownership and a redevelopment plan already taking shape behind the scenes, not a slow public decline. For a Foothill Ranch resident who noticed the theater simply stopped opening its doors one week and never explained why, that's the actual answer.

Here's how the rest of the timeline played out, from first film to first demolition permit:

Almost two years passed between the theater's final closing night and the first tractor showing up to tear it down. None of that time was spent looking for a new tenant. It was spent moving a single project through the city's entitlement process.

What residents said at the February hearing

At the February 5 Planning Commission hearing, the project had public backers. Dwight Robinson, a Lake Forest resident of 27 years and a former councilmember and mayor, urged approval and argued a local Costco would keep sales tax dollars in the city instead of leaking to neighboring cities where residents already drive to shop. That's not a small argument in a city budget conversation: stores like this can post annual sales exceeding $250 million, according to Orange County Register reporting cited in coverage of the project.

Andrew O'Connor, a long-time Foothill Ranch resident, spoke against it. His concerns weren't about Costco as a company. He argued residents hadn't been adequately consulted, raised traffic and quality of life questions, and warned that a big-box store could hurt the independent restaurants and the food court that had shared the same site as the old theater.

The commission's own traffic study, prepared by consultant De Novo Planning Group, found that most nearby intersections would keep operating at Level of Service A or B (the two highest ratings, meaning minimal driver delay) through 2028. Two intersections were flagged at lower levels of service. Staff told commissioners the study didn't identify a need for new turning lanes or intersection upgrades, and that Costco had agreed to some additional measures on top of what the study required.

That combination, mostly reassuring numbers plus a couple of flagged intersections, is probably why the project moved forward but didn't move forward unanimously. Someone filed an appeal after the Planning Commission's approval. The City Council held what the project's CEQA filing calls a hearing de novo, denied the appeal, and let the approval stand. That appeal and its resolution are the reason the timeline runs through March 2026 instead of stopping in February.

What's actually going into the ground

The approved project calls for a 165,068 square foot warehouse store, 34 feet tall, with an entrance canopy, on-site parking, and a tire service center. It sits on the 16 acre southwestern portion of Foothill Ranch Towne Centre, between Alton Parkway and Bake Parkway near the 241 Toll Road, at what the city lists as 26602 Towne Centre Drive.

Two details matter more to daily life than the square footage. First, current plans don't include a gas station. Residents hoping this solves their fill-up routine as well as their bulk-shopping one will need to keep an eye on future revisions, since none have been announced. Second, this would be Costco's 14th location in Orange County, and it's positioned to be a shorter drive for people in parts of Irvine, Mission Viejo, and the Saddleback foothills who currently drive past Lake Forest to reach an existing store.

The trade a lot of residents are making

Losing the theater means Foothill Ranch no longer has one in its own footprint. The Planning Commission hearing surfaced the same tension that shows up any time a single-use entertainment venue gets replaced by a big-box retailer: one type of trip out of the neighborhood gets easier, another gets harder. What made O'Connor's objection specific rather than reflexive was the food court. That shared building, next to the old theater, served as a casual dinner-before-a-movie stop for a lot of families. Its fate under the new site plan wasn't detailed in the meeting record, and the city hasn't published anything since suggesting it's staying as is.

What happens next, and what doesn't have an answer yet

The city's own process description, published on its website after the February approval, lays out the sequence plainly: once the applicant clears a building permit check, a demolition permit can be issued, and only then can crews start clearing the site. That's exactly what happened, on a delay that ran from February's approval through the March CEQA filing and into August's demolition. What the city hasn't published is a construction timeline or an opening date. Anyone budgeting a shopping trip around this store showing up should plan on watching for building permits and framing work as the next visible signal, not a specific month on a calendar.

For now, the corner of Foothill Ranch that used to smell like popcorn on a Friday night is a cleared lot. What replaces it will be busier, tax-generating, and closer to home for a wider radius of Orange County shoppers. Whether it changes the character of that corner the way the food court and marquee once did is the part nobody voted on, because it wasn't on the agenda.

If you're weighing what a shift like this means for property values or day-to-day life near Foothill Ranch Towne Centre, NMC Realty knows this stretch of Lake Forest well enough to talk it through in plain terms. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually changing around you.