After the pandemic forced the movie theater industry of Los Angeles into a downward spiral, the city is now seeing new life with new openings and renovations to previously closed theaters. 

Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas recently opened an exclusive dine-in Imax in Inglewood in July. Amazon opened the Culver Theater in December 2022, showing some of its Prime Video premiere events. Landmark recently opened a location on Sunset Boulevard. Quentin Tarantino-owned Vista Theater and Netflix’s Egyptian Theater are currently experiencing renovations; the famed ArcLight Hollywood and Cinerama Dome are also closed for renovations and are expected to reopen in late 2023 or early 2024. 

“I think it’s shockingly optimistic. Who knew coming out of the pandemic that suddenly the art house cinema and independent cinema scene in Los Angeles would be as thriving as it is?” said Maggie Mackay, the executive director of Vidiots. Vidiots, the female-led video store forced to close its doors in 2017, recently opened its theater next to its new video store in Eagle Rock. “What we said we wanted to do was create a space for the community– see the real community reflected in audiences, see the diversity of our communities in those audiences and up on the screen.”

The recent rise in the movie industry after the pandemic and the continued success of theaters has proven that the myth of streaming services killing movie theater culture is somewhat false. “The myth that people stopped wanting to go to the movies or stopped caring has been really dangerous,” said Mackay. “I think it’s much more about how unaffordable it got, how complicated it got to go to the movies. It just got harder, not because people didn’t want to do it.”