Sony Pictures is in early talks to lease and operate the legendary Cinerama Dome theater in Hollywood, Variety has confirmed.
Sony has been actively moving into the exhibition business in the past few years, acquiring the Alamo Drafthouse chain in 2024 for its Sony Pictures Experiences arm and investing in Cosm shared-reality experiences earlier this year.
Sony would operate the theaters under a lease arrangement and would not be able to use the name Arclight, due to Chapter 7 proceedings, according to Deadline, which first reported the talks. In addition, Alamo Drafthouse would likely be involved in operating the complex.
The Culver City studio had no comment. Decurion Corp, the parent company of owners Robertson Property Group, which is owned by the Forman family, likewise had no comment.
Robertson Property Group has been conducting renovations in the theater off and on for the past several years, but there is currently no prospective opening date. In May, a liquor license renewal was approved at a city hearing, paving the way for reopening.
The closure of the Dome and Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood has been painful for both locals and industry creatives, leaving countless baffled that powerbrokers in town have not found a way to open the doors again.
“Those theaters have sat dormant for six years,” one top movie theater exec groaned to Variety earlier this year at CinemaCon. “Imagine the mold.”
The Blue Note Jazz Club recently opened an L.A. location in the Dome complex, with 100-seat and 200-seat theaters.
Pacific Theatres, which later declared bankruptcy, closed the ArcLight chain and the Cinerama Dome permanently a year after COVID lockdowns suspended movie theater operations. Although several of the ArcLight locations were taken over by other operators, the Dome and ArcLight multiplex in Hollywood, which are owned outright by Pacific’s parent company Decurion, have been sitting empty ever since.
The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963, originally as a showcase for the three-panel Cinerama process. Until its closure, it was one of the city’s highest-grossing multiplexes and a favorite stop for splashy premieres and events like a special preview screening of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
Los Angeles theaters have undergone big changes since the pandemic. Landmark Theatres closed its Pico Boulevard location in 2022, and the Bruin and Fox theaters in Westwood Village closed in 2024. The Fox was taken over by a consortium of filmmakers led by Jason Reitman, who is working on remodeling the venue and has opened it to screenings this summer in advance of the remodeling as the Director’s Village.
— Matt Donnelly contributed to this report.
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