Drive down E. Rollins Road in Round Lake Beach, one of the four Round Lake area villages that share a park district and school system, and you will pass a shopping center with a movie theater sign that has not lit up since January 2023. The building at 550 E. Rollins Road, just south of the village municipal complex, still carries the outline of a Regal Cinemas marquee. Inside, the screens and projector rooms have sat damaged since an arson fire tore through the building in April 2024. For most of the last three and a half years, this has been the one obviously stalled piece of an otherwise busy stretch of Round Lake.
That contrast is the actual story. While the theater sat dark, the neighborhood around it did not wait for it to catch up.
Closed In 2023, Still Closed In 2026
The Regal in Round Lake Beach was one of 39 locations Cineworld Group shuttered nationwide in early 2023 after the chain's bankruptcy. A Texas-based developer, Thakkar Developers, bought the freestanding building at auction by the end of that year with plans to convert it into a family entertainment center. Then came the fire in April 2024, which damaged the screens and projector rooms and pushed the timeline back again.
The village didn't announce the redevelopment publicly until March 2025: a 72,000-square-foot entertainment center with seven movie screens, a full-service restaurant, axe throwing, and space held for a possible multi-level indoor electric go-kart track, modeled on a similar Thakkar project in Irving, Texas. Final plans were expected to be submitted in summer 2025, with a grand opening "anticipated in 2026." As of this writing, no firm opening month has been announced. Mayor Scott Nickles called it a project that would become "a major draw for Round Lake Beach," and Economic Development Director Gil Rivera framed it as part of a plan to grow the retail corridor around it.
So the theater has now been closed longer than most of its future tenants have been under construction anywhere else. That's the kind of detail you only notice if you've been watching the same storefront for three years.
What Filled The Gap
Here's what opened, expanded, or drew a crowd in the neighborhood around that dark marquee while it sat waiting:
- Hero Park, an all-inclusive playground built by the Round Lake Area Park District, opened in summer 2025.
- East End Park got a new playground installation in fall 2025.
- The Summertime LIVE concert series, paired with the El Mercadito Farmers Market at the Round Lake Beach Cultural & Civic Center, ran every other Thursday from May 28 through August 6 this year, pulling in food trucks like San Judas Food Truck and drink vendors including Harbor Brewing.
- Round Lake Heights is holding its own Summer Festival on August 22, from 5 to 10 p.m.
- The 5th Annual Elote Fest returns to the Civic Center on August 28, with a carnival, live music, and a drone light show, an event that's grown enough in five years to add production elements a smaller neighborhood festival usually can't afford.
None of this required the theater to reopen first. The Park District built two new playgrounds, the Civic Center built out a recurring concert and market series, and a corn festival went from a modest first year to a drone show, all while the biggest single redevelopment project in the corridor stayed on hold. If you're waiting to see whether Round Lake's entertainment options are "coming," you've already been living through several years of them arriving in smaller pieces.
The Trail Nobody Finished, And Round Lake Got The Half That Works
The Millennium Trail is supposed to eventually run 41 miles, linking central, western, and northern Lake County into one connected greenway. It isn't finished. The Lake County Forest Preserves puts the currently open mileage at 33. TrailLink, measuring its own mapped route from Forest View Park in Lindenhurst to Midlothian Road in Mundelein, gets 30.7 miles. Either way, the trail exists today as two separate stretches with no off-road connection between them, which means a rider trying to link the northern and southern halves has to detour onto local roads to do it.
Round Lake sits on the southern segment, the half that functions today as one continuous, rideable stretch rather than a scattered set of trail fragments. The trailhead for that stretch is Fairfield Park, part of the Round Lake Area Park District, and from there the path runs south of County Road 31 through Rollins Savanna Forest Preserve, alternating between prairie and shaded tree groves, before continuing along E. Rollins Road and ending where Sunset Avenue meets Beachview Drive. That's a real, rideable stretch of trail through an actual forest preserve, not a stub that dead-ends at a parking lot.
The northern segment runs through its own set of preserves, Lindenhurst's McDonald Woods and Bonner Heritage Farm among them, but the link between the two halves is the piece that's still missing, and neither the Forest Preserves nor TrailLink lists a timeline for closing it. If you live near Fairfield Park, you're not waiting on a regional trail system to finish. You already have the part that works.
The Lake Behind The Building
The Cultural & Civic Center where Elote Fest and the farmers market series happen sits on Hook Lake, with a banquet room that overlooks the water and seats up to 500 for theater-style events. Its lobby holds a wooden cabinet salvaged from the old Browns Hardware Store, a piece of Round Lake's retail history repurposed into a building that now hosts drone shows and ABBA tribute nights. It's a small detail, but it says something about how this village treats its older buildings when they close: not as dead space to be forgotten, but as raw material for whatever comes next.
Which brings the story back to the theater. Rollins Crossing isn't a neighborhood waiting for something to happen. It's a neighborhood that has already absorbed a stalled anchor building and kept building around it anyway. When the marquee does eventually light back up, sometime in 2026 if the timeline holds, it won't be introducing Round Lake to family entertainment. It'll be catching up to a corridor that already has two new playgrounds, a growing fall festival, and a farmers market series that just wrapped its own successful season.
If you already live here, you've watched this happen in real time. If you're the type who reads the Daily Herald's business page or checks the Round Lake Beach village news before anyone mentions it at a block party, you already knew most of this. The rest of the corridor didn't slow down for one dark building, and neither should the read on this place.
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