The 113-year-old Roxie Theater just might be around for another 113 years, as the movie house has been secretly working on a deal to buy the theater property outright, and they’re launching a fundraising leg of that campaign to complete the deal.
The last few years have been a very rough stretch for movie theaters, so we’ll celebrate some good news for the Mission District’s venerable landmark the Roxie Theater. The Chronicle has a tidbit of news today that the 16th Street movie house is currently on pace for 2025 to its best year ever for attendance, topping the theater’s high-water-mark for attendance in the pre-COVID year of 2019. But that tidbit comes in the form of a much bigger announcement, as the Chron reports that the Roxie Theater is buying its building from the landlord, in hopes of staying an indie movie house for generations to come.
“For the last year, we have been privately pursuing a big goal: to raise $7 million to purchase our building, invest in technology upgrades, and expand our programming, ensuring that The Roxie remains a cherished and thriving institution in SF for the long haul,” the theater said in a Monday morning announcement. “We are closing in on our goal and only have $1.5 million left to raise, thanks to early support and enthusiasm of our community and generous donors who care deeply about San Francisco film culture.”
You can donate to the Roxie’s fundraising drive here.
While the Roxie has announced that their overall fundraising goal is $7 million, and they’ve apparently already raised about $5.5 million of that, the overall sale price of the theater was not disclosed. The theater has apparently been working on this deal in private for at least a year.
But the Roxie, which now operates as a nonprofit, seems to have had very good relations with their landlords the Abecassis family. The deal will encompass the main 234-seat Roxie Theater, the adjacent 50-seat Little Roxie, plus the next-door bar Dalva. So should the sale go through, the Roxie would be Dalva’s landlord.
“The campaign’s about more than just buying the building,” Roxie executive director Lex Sloan told the Chronicle. “It’s about the long term future of the theater.”
“There’s always the fear of displacement,” Sloan added. “Even when you have a wonderful landlord, you’re still at the whim of a rental market, a real estate market. In not owning the building, it’s sometimes been hard to make big investments and upgrades.”
The news comes before a big week next week for the Roxie. Next Monday, director David Cronenberg himself will be at the Roxie for a Q&A after a screening of his new horror/sci-fi film The Shrouds. (It opens Friday.) Then next Wednesday, the SFFILM Festival is giving The Roxie its prestigious Mel Novikoff Award before a screening of the 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic Rashomon. Prior to that screening, Sloan will join the theater’s director of programming Isabel Fondevila and filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes for “a conversation about the Roxie’s past, present, and future.”
And that “future” part just got a lot more interesting.
Related: The Roxie Theater, SF's Oldest Cinema, Gets A Three-Year Reprieve From Landlord [SFist]
Image: Annabelle R via Yelp
