Sony Pictures in July announced that the celebrated theater, built in 1963 and shuttered during Covid, will reopen in 2028
Drive down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and you’ll see a movie theater straight out of The Jetsons.
Built in 1963, the Cinerama dome is instantly memorable: a white,geodesic construction that looks like a giant golf ball cut in half and plopped down in the middle of the city.
In recent years, however, it’s served as a sad memorial to better times in the movie business – the cinema closed in 2020, with no certainty that it would ever open again.
This summer, things finally changed. Sony Pictures in July announced that the Cinerama dome would reopen in 2028, thanks to a new agreement with its owners. It’s great news for cinephiles, as well as fans of LA architecture; the building was designated as a historic cultural monument in 1998.
The closed Cinerama dome “has become a symbol of everything that went wrong during Covid”, says Adrian Scott Fine, president and CEO of the LA Conservancy. “To have this come back is really, really good news,” he adds, saying it’s perhaps an indicator that LA is “getting back to where it once was”.
The reopening comes amid more good news for the movie industry: between blockbuster successes like The Odyssey and tiny-budget hits like Obsession, cinemas are experiencing their biggest year since before the pandemic. Is the Cinerama dome’s reopening a hopeful sign of the times?
The fight to save the dome
The story of the cinema’s fall and rise tracks the story of filmgoing in recent years. Like movie theaters across the US, the dome closed as Covid took hold; unlike many of those theaters, it never reopened. That felt like a tragedy to many Angelenos, who inundated the conservancy with calls asking about its future.
The original films presented in the Cinerama widescreen format featured three projectors and a curved screenfor immersive viewing. Many cinemas were adapted to show the movies, but the dome, constructed of 316 concrete hexagons and pentagons, was purpose-built for the Cinerama experience. “There’s nothing else like it in the world,” says Fine. “Every Angeleno loves this building.”
Among them is Benjamin Steinberg, a 26-year-old film-maker and activist who led the push for reopening. “I think it’s one of the most important movie theaters in the world, and to have it sitting abandoned for over literally five years and zero contact from the owners was extremely frustrating,” Steinberg says.
He created a petition to save the dome “within five minutes” of hearing the closure would be permanent. The petition, directed at the cinema’s owners, the Decurion Corporation, quickly got tens of thousands of signatures – to little effect. Steinberg eventually opted for more aggressive tactics, including rallies outside the theater and, finally, projecting pictures of the owners on to the side of the dome in April. “That went extremely viral,” he said. It also resulted in a police response.
After a public hearing a few weeks later, Sony announced the deal.
“Hot damn! We’re bringing the Dome back, baby,” said Tom Rothman, the CEO of Sony Pictures, in a statement on 22 July. “We believe in moviegoing down to our soul, and no venue on earth stands more for that than the one-of-a-kind Dome.”
Under the new arrangement, Alamo Drafthouse – a dine-in theater chain Sony Pictures bought in 2024 – will operate the venue. Sony plans to maintain its historic feel and its name, which comes from the film technology it was originally built to show.
Since the Cinerama technology faded in the 1960s, the dome has shown traditional films on a curved screen, which will remain in use at the 956-seat, single-screen movie palace. Meanwhile, in good news for Elijah Wood and others infuriated by Alamo’s recent policy requiring patrons to order food on their phones, the dome will offer traditional concessions rather than meals. (Reopened screens next door will be dine-in theaters.)
The Cinerama dome is one of several LA theaters that have lately been rescued. The Westwood Village theater, built in 1930, closed in 2024 but will reopen in 2027 after a collective of directors, including Jason Reitman, Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, purchased it. The nearby Bruin theater, which closed the same year, is expected to reopen in the autumn. Kristen Stewart recently purchased the century-old Highland Park theater.
“This is a town that’s very passionate about their favorite movie theaters and root for them like baseball teams, and they’re happy to see an old favorite come back,” says Amy Nicholson, film critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Signs of resurgence – but struggles remain
It all comes amid a hopeful year for filmgoing.
The pandemic “was the most serious gut punch that the industry had seen”, says Jason Squire, host of the Movie Business Podcast and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s school of cinematic arts, saying it had been more transformative for cinema “than the coming of sound”.
But on Tuesday, the summer box office hit $4bn for only the second time since 2020 – the previous mark was in 2023, fueled by the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, and this time the milestone has come weeks earlier. Revenues are expected to reach $10bn for the year for the first time since Covid hit
“It’s been a fabulous summer, and all movie lovers and all executives are celebrating the fact that people have not stayed at home on their couch,” says Squire. “Every couple of years, there are stories about the demise and death of movie theaters, and it’s just not a valid assumption.”
What, exactly, is driving the apparent resurgence? Critics and analysts have a number of theories, beginning with the quality of the films themselves. “It’s been a year that I, as a critic, have been looking forward to a long time,” says Nicholson. “The year that Hollywood finally starts to trust in younger film-makers and younger audiences enough to pass them the camera.”
That was most evident in horror films like Obsession and Backrooms, both of which were directed by twentysomethings. “We have a generation of talent that is growing up learning how to not only write, direct and edit their own shorts, but they’ve also learned by posting them online and getting instant feedback on what audiences like,” Nicholson says.
Maybe it’s working: younger audiences are today’s biggest filmgoers, according to a recent Fandango study, which found that 87% of gen Zers and 82% of millennials had gone to the movies in the past year, versus 70% of gen Xers and 58% of baby boomers.
Social platforms like TikTok and Letterboxd, the app where users share their own film reviews, are also driving a “culture of moviegoing” among younger people, says Carlos Aguilar, an LA-based film critic. “People want to watch the movie that everyone’s talking about, whether it’s an Obsession or The Odyssey,” Aguilar says.
That communal experience may be key, especially at a time when daily life feels incredibly expensive. “I think about the Great Depression and how that was one of the belle epoques of cinema, because people needed hope and a place to go because the economy was in crisis,” says Beandrea July, a critic, culture writer and host of the culture podcast Annotations. “I think many people are feeling the crunch of inflation, of there not being enough work, of wages being stagnant, and movies provide an escape from that.”
The rosy box office news comes with a bit of cognitive dissonance: while it’s a good year for filmgoers in LA, times remain difficult for the people making those movies. Box office figures are “only one indicator” of the industry’s health, July says. “I work with a lot of different film-makers, mostly independent film-makers, and it’s just been extremely tough for even really celebrated, Oscar-nominated film-makers to get their films made,” July says.
That’s in part because studio gatekeepers are often risk-averse, preferring to invest in a sure bet like The Odyssey over an independent film. Meanwhile, much production has moved elsewhere, for a number of reasons including the cost of shooting in LA, tax incentives in other cities, regulatory challenges and the simple fact that technology has made it easier to work anywhere. Shooting days in LA fell 20% from early 2024 to early 2025.
But some critics see reason for hope in a shifting industry, pointing, for instance, to the success of Obsession, made for $750,000, compared with The Odyssey’s $250m. As of Tuesday, Obsession had grossed more than $263m worldwide
“I do think that we’re in a time where all the common wisdom about what it takes to make a successful movie is over,” Nicholson says. “The idea that you need to have a gigantic production budget with a ton of special effects, I think that’s ending. I think the idea that you have to have one of this small group of 30 movie stars to open a movie, that’s ending too.”
Still, she says, “it’s going to take studios a long time to trust the idea that audiences will show up for good stories”. Film, Aguilar notes, remains a “gate-kept art form”.
Despite the industry’s struggles, LA remains a city of cinephiles where those audiences do show up.
“As much as people want to believe or think that movie theaters are on the way out, they continue to challenge that,” Aguilar says, referring to cinephiles. “Even if we have all the streaming and access to content all the time, people still want to go to the movies.”
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