These Yuletide moviegoers are worried.
The city’s moviegoers woke up like a pile of coal on Christmas morning: The popular Kips Bay AMC theater was partially closed and their movie tickets were canceled due to “unexpected” flooding at Manhattan’s Second Avenue multiplex.
An AMC employee told The Post on Wednesday that a pipe burst in the theater on Monday during a screening of the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” causing about 3 feet of flooding and forcing the evacuation.
“Unfortunately due to a broken pipe, we are not playing any showings of ‘A Complete Unknown’ today except in IMAX,” the employee said. There are no prepaid tickets for that either as the cinema’s computer servers are still down.
“It’s totally annoying, I know. A large portion of theaters are closed,” the employee said. “Some theaters can run only the first show and the last show. It really depends.”
The employee said that for the past three days, AMC employees have been borrowing equipment from neighboring theaters “because we have to be open on Christmas, our busiest day of the year.
“You don’t know the half of it, trust me,” he said. “Everyone wants to see Bob Dylan for some reason.”
A representative for AMC Theaters did not return The Post’s request for comment.
Several AMC customers told The Post or warned on social media that the theater apparently still sold movie tickets online for its theaters affected by the closure, leading to hours or even minutes before show time. Cinema expectations have been left in the dark.
“Christmas is ruined,” one theater goer posted on X around 12:30 p.m., shortly after their show closed. “AMC Kips Bay canceled all our tickets.”
Sigi Nagar, 45, who came to the Kips Bay cinema with her mother on Wednesday afternoon, said: “I’m extremely disappointed – it’s a great movie time of year, and we book movie tickets weeks in advance, and obviously They had a hiccup in the theater – but they don’t contact you.
“I’m totally disappointed because I’m a big fan of Dylan and I really wanted to see the movie,” the Gramercy resident said. “We’d probably drive around now and feel sorry for ourselves and listen to Dylan on the radio.
He said, “I’m Jewish, and so we go to the movies, and eat food, and that’s what we do.” “It was our first choice.”
Paula Naftali and her husband Danny drove from Manhasset, Long Island, to enjoy lunch and a movie in the Big Apple and arrived at Theater 7 on Wednesday afternoon.
But Naftalis was deeply disappointed when a theater employee informed him that his screening had been canceled due to a burst pipe and that he would have to wait for a later IMAX showing.
“What are we going to do for an hour?” Paula told The Post. “We came from Long Island and had a nice lunch in town, and we had planned to see the 3:45 (noon) screening, but no one told us. There was no information.
“I was surprised, shocked and disappointed and obviously angry that we weren’t informed,” she said. “Every Christmas, we have a tradition where we come and go to a restaurant and watch the movie that’s just starting. We always come to this theatre.
Burt Kimmel, 91, of the Upper East Side, came to the Kips Bay Multiplex with his daughter, Melissa Saperstein, 57, on Wednesday afternoon — and the pair got the same bad news.
“We had already purchased tickets, we even had tickets for wheelchair accessible seats,” Kimmel said. He said his daughter was reimbursed for a free pass to another show in the future.
Saperstein said, “As lifelong Jews in New York City, we’re used to going to the movies on Christmas, and guess where we’re going for dinner — Chinese.
“So now we’re just looking forward to our Chinese dinner, (but) we’re not hungry for it yet. We were hungry for our film.
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