WINDHAM – Smitty’s Cinema in North Windham is expanding into the former storage area of the discount merchandise chain Big Lots, which closed in January.

In mid-February, Smitty’s, a New England dinner-and-movie chain, began to construct a 170-seat theater on 3,700 square feet of the former Big Lots storage area, according to Tucker Smith, the cinema’s general manager.

The new space, which will allow for an eighth movie theater, will abut the existing cinema complex. It will be the Windham Smitty’s biggest theater yet, with a 28-by-14-foot-screen and seven tiers of seating accompanied by dinner tables. The largest of the cinema’s seven existing theaters has 115 seats, Smith said.

“It’s going to add quite a bit of capacity and hopefully a little bit more variety to the movies,” Smith said.

Construction of the new theater, which will cost around $400,000, will require the cinema to hire six new employees, Smith said. The existing cinema, which is about 19,000 square feet, employs about 60 full- and part-time workers, Smith said. Smitty’s is not hiring at this point, he said.

Smith said that Smitty’s had been planning the extension since it moved into the Windham Mall in January 2013.

“It’s something we’ve been planning since we took over the space last year,” he said. “It just happened to be a coincidence that Big Lots moved out at the same time.”

According to Smith, the new theater will open on April 9.

Jay Wise, the owner of WRE, the leasing representative for the Windham Mall, said that Smitty’s would have expanded, regardless of the decision by Big Lots to close. Wise said that Big Lots opened in the Windham Mall in the late 1990s and closed in late January, after failing to renew its lease. No officials at Big Lots’ Columbus, Ohio, headquarters could be reached for comment.

According to Wise, Big Lots had been renting 43,000 square feet of space. With Big Lots’ exit from the scene, about one quarter of the Windham Mall’s 176,000 square feet stands vacant, he said. Tenants in the facility include Pizza Hut, Burger King, Friendly’s, Marshall’s and Hannaford. Since Wise started working at the mall in 1999, the vacancy rate has usually hovered around 5 percent, he said.

Despite the fact that there are no new tenants lined up, Wise said he remains unconcerned about Big Lots’ closure.

“It will come back. Any good national retail tenant that comes to Windham, we’ll get them. We’re cheaper than anybody else, so we’ll get them,” Wise added.

Aimee Senatore, executive director of the Sebago Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce, lamented Big Lots’ departure.

“Honestly, it’s unfortunate,” Senatore said. “It’s another business that’s leaving the area. It’s another vacant space.”

Senatore lauded Smitty’s expansion, however.

“Smitty’s is a chamber member, and it’s wonderful that they have an opportunity to expand their services,” she said.

Tom Bartell, the town’s economic development director, said he hoped the laid-off employees at Big Lots would be able to find new work.

“Any time a decision is made to close a business in town, it affects the employees as well as the general public,” Bartell said. “It’s disappointing that that happened, but those decisions are made by corporate headquarters and in this case that’s the decision that was made. It’s unfortunate. It’s disappointing. But it’s also reality, and we have to move on from that and hopefully the employees can find new work.”

In mid-February, Smitty’s began to construct a 170-seat theater on 3,700 square feet of the former Big Lots storage area, according to Tucker Smith, the cinema’s general manager. It will be Smitty’s biggest theater yet, with a 28-by-14-foot-screen and seven tiers of seating.