Drive past the corner of Portola Parkway and Towne Centre Drive this month and you will see chain-link fencing, a cleared pad where the old theater marquee used to sit, and heavy equipment parked where the ticket line once formed. If you have lived near Foothill Ranch Towne Centre for a while, you probably stopped registering that building years ago anyway. It went dark in September 2024, and for almost two years it just sat there, a boarded-up anchor at the edge of a shopping center that kept humming around it.
That gap matters more than the demolition does. The theater did not close because a bulldozer showed up. It closed, sat vacant through 2025, and only now, in the last few weeks of summer 2026, is anything actually happening on the site. What replaces it tells you something the empty building never could: this corner of Lake Forest is done being a place you go for a night out and has fully become a place you go to cross things off a list.
What was actually there
The building itself was an 87,263 square foot commercial space, built as a movie theater and never really used for anything else in its life. It ran as a Regal for years, briefly changed hands to Cinemark in 2023, reopened for about a year, then closed for good. If you were one of the people who caught a last movie there before September 2024, you watched the final run of a theater that had anchored that end of the Towne Centre since the shopping center itself was young.
For a shopping center built around a mix of big-box anchors (Target and Walmart hold down the other end) and a food court designed for lingering, losing the theater took away the one tenant whose whole purpose was to make people stay longer than an errand requires.
What the city actually approved
The Lake Forest Planning Commission approved the replacement project on February 5, 2026, and the vote was unanimous. After a 15-day appeal window closed on February 23 with no appeal filed, the project could move to building permits. The plans that got approved are specific enough to tell you exactly what is coming:
- A 165,068 square foot Costco Wholesale warehouse, 34 feet tall, with an entrance canopy
- A tire service center
- A food court and seasonal outdoor sales area
- Surface-level parking
- No gas station, at least not in this version of the plans
That last detail is easy to skip past, but it is the one that changes how you will actually use this place. A Costco with a gas station turns into a single stop where you fill the tank, grab a rotisserie chicken, and leave. A Costco without one means the gas run still happens somewhere else, probably at one of the stations already clustered along El Toro Road or Bake Parkway. You get the bulk shopping five minutes closer to home. You do not get the one-stop trip some residents were hoping for.
The environmental review moved fast because it did not need to be built from scratch. City staff determined the project fit within the scope of the 2040 Lake Forest General Plan's already-certified environmental impact report, which meant no new CEQA documentation was required. That is a technical point, but the practical effect is that the entire approval, from application to final sign-off, happened in well under a year.
The argument that actually happened at the podium
Public hearings on big-box projects tend to produce predictable testimony, but the one on February 5 surfaced a genuinely local disagreement worth knowing about if you shop at this center regularly.
Dwight Robinson, a Lake Forest resident of 27 years and a former councilmember and mayor, spoke in favor. His argument was not about convenience. It was about where Lake Forest households are already spending their Costco money. He told the commission that residents he had talked to were enthusiastic, and that a local store could cut down on the sales tax the city currently loses to Costco trips in neighboring cities. If you are one of the people already driving to the Aliso Viejo or Mission Viejo warehouse, his point is that you are already doing this errand. The only question was whether Lake Forest gets the tax revenue for it.
Andrew O'Connor, a longtime Foothill Ranch resident, argued the opposite side. His concerns were not abstract. He said residents had not been adequately consulted, raised worries about added traffic, and warned that a big-box anchor could hurt the smaller, independent restaurants that share the food court, the kind of places that depend on people parking once and wandering rather than parking, loading a flatbed cart, and leaving.
Commissioners pressed staff on the traffic question directly. The technical study projected levels of service of A or B, meaning free-flowing traffic, at most nearby intersections through 2028, with two intersections coming in lower. Staff told the commission the study did not identify a need for new turn lanes or intersection upgrades, and that Costco had volunteered some additional measures beyond what was strictly required. Whether that holds up once a Saturday afternoon in December actually happens is the kind of thing you find out by living through it, not by reading a traffic study.
What changes for the people who actually eat there
If you regularly grab lunch at Chipotle or Red Robin in that food court, or you have made a habit of the Thai place with the outdoor patio and live music some evenings, O'Connor's concern is the one worth watching. Nobody on record is predicting those tenants close. But a 165,068 square foot warehouse pulling in a different kind of shopper, someone loading a car for a monthly stock-up rather than parking for a 45-minute meal, does change who is circling that parking lot on a Saturday and how long they stay.
For residents in the neighborhoods that already treat this stretch of Portola Parkway as part of their weekly loop, Skyridge, Baker Ranch, The Oaks at Portola Hills, this is not a hypothetical shift. It is the corner where you already stop for groceries, a haircut, or dinner before or after a trail walk. The version of that corner you knew for the last decade, movie marquee included, is not coming back. The version replacing it is built for people running errands, not for people deciding how to spend an evening.
What nobody has confirmed yet
Here is what the city has not said: an opening date. When Patch asked Lake Forest officials directly about timing after demolition began, they did not immediately respond. Big-box construction of this size typically runs well over a year once permits clear, but that is a general pattern, not a promise, and nothing here suggests the city has committed to a specific month or even a season.
What is confirmed is that demolition crews were already on site clearing the old theater as of late August 2026, work that one Orange County resident who used to take his family there described with mixed feelings, calling it a place that had felt like a genuine neighborhood spot before it went dark. That sentiment is probably shared by more people than showed up to the February hearing. The building is gone either way. What replaces it will just be waiting there the next time you pull into that parking lot for something else entirely.
If you are watching this corner of Lake Forest change and wondering what it means for property values nearby, or you are simply trying to keep track of what is actually happening at the Towne Centre before you plan around it, The Harter Group tracks these shifts as part of daily life in the neighborhoods we work in. Request Your Free Home Valuation if you are curious how local changes like this one are shaping up on the numbers side, or just reach out with questions about what is coming to your corner of Lake Forest.
