Anyone who's driven past Plymouth Grand 15 on Highway 55 in the past two weeks has probably noticed the plywood. One auditorium entrance boarded off, a company sign apologizing for the noise, ticket sales quietly redirected to the other fourteen screens. It looks like routine maintenance. It isn't.

Mann Theatres is converting its XDX auditorium at the Plymouth location into a full IMAX with Laser screen, and the project is bigger than a typical multiplex refresh. Construction started August 24. The new screen opens October 2, roughly 55 feet wide and 30 feet tall, and it will debut with the new Tom Cruise film "Digger." The old XDX format isn't going away. It's relocating to a different auditorium in the same building, so the theater ends up with both formats instead of trading one for the other.

That's the surface story, and if you've already seen a headline about it, you know the basics. What's easy to miss is what this actually changes about where Plymouth sits on the Twin Cities movie map.

A Ninety-Year-Old Family Business Making Its Biggest Bet

Mann Theatres was founded in 1935 by Marvin and Ted Mann. It's now run by the third generation of the family, and company leadership has been direct about what this project means to them. Michelle Mann called the IMAX conversion one of the largest investments in the company's history, telling CBS Minnesota the company is "just so excited and grateful to be able to bring this opportunity to communities."

The timing isn't random. The decision followed the outsized box office performance of "The Odyssey" in IMAX format earlier this year, a signal to Mann that audiences will drive for the format if the picture is big enough. Rather than wait for a new build somewhere else, the company chose to retrofit an existing screen at its Plymouth location, the same eight-theater chain that also operates in Baxter, Champlin, Edina, Grand Rapids, Hibbing, and two St. Paul locations.

For a longtime customer like Tim Whaley, who regularly brings groups of children from an out-of-school-time program to the Plymouth theater, the appeal is straightforward: a reason to keep coming back to a place he already goes.

Why This Makes Plymouth the Outlier

Here's the part that changes the local calculus. Every other IMAX screen in the Twin Cities metro belongs to a national chain. AMC runs the format at its Eden Prairie, Rosedale, and Southdale locations. Emagine added an IMAX screen at its Lakeville theater in December. Outside the metro, the Marcus Galaxy 14 in Rochester rounds out the state's current lineup.

Plymouth Grand 15 will be the sixth IMAX screen in Minnesota, and the first one owned by a family-run, Minnesota-based company rather than a regional or national circuit. That inverts the usual pattern. Normally the biggest screen format clusters at the biggest corporate multiplexes, which tend to sit farther from residential neighborhoods and closer to regional retail corridors. Plymouth residents who wanted the format before this fall were driving to Eden Prairie or the southern suburbs. Now it's sitting inside a theater most of them already treat as their default.

The IMAX landscape in Minnesota has actually been unstable over the past year. CMX's bankruptcy closed a Burnsville IMAX screen last summer, which makes Mann's decision to add rather than shed a screen a little more notable. Where other companies have been retreating from the format, a family-owned chain picked this exact moment to expand into it, and picked a suburban neighborhood theater to do it in rather than a flagship downtown location.

What This Means If You're Planning Around It

The construction window runs about four weeks, so anyone who tried to catch a specific film at Plymouth Grand 15 in late August or early September likely got redirected to a different auditorium without much warning. That settles by October 2, when the new screen opens.

A few practical notes worth knowing before you plan a night out:

• The new IMAX auditorium debuts with "Digger," the new Tom Cruise release, on October 2.
• The XDX screen isn't disappearing. It's moving to a different room in the same building, so both premium formats will coexist rather than one replacing the other.
• This is Mann's first IMAX screen across all eight of its Minnesota locations, so Plymouth becomes the flagship for the format within the company, not just an addition to an existing lineup elsewhere.

If you've been holding off on seeing something the way it's meant to be seen, that October date is the one to circle.

What It Says About the Neighborhood

None of this changes property values or school boundaries or anything a real estate listing would mention. What it does is add another data point to something Plymouth residents already sense: the neighborhood keeps landing investment that skips past being a bedroom community and starts feeling like a destination in its own right. A family business founded in 1935 didn't need to put its biggest technology bet in Plymouth. It chose to.

For a theater that's been part of the daily rhythm here for years, the plywood outside one auditorium is a small inconvenience for a few weeks. What comes out the other side is a screen most of the Twin Cities still has to drive to, sitting a few minutes from home.

If you're weighing what a move into this part of the west metro actually looks like day to day, from the businesses that choose to invest here to the neighborhoods around them, Aaron Lowe has spent more than 18 years watching Plymouth take shape one decision like this at a time. Let's connect.