The Alex Theatre Is Playing New Movies Again. It's Still Doing Everything Else, Too.

The last new movie the Alex Theatre put on its screen was "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." That was 1991. The next new movie did not open there until July 17, 2026, when Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" arrived in 70mm. Thirty-five years is long enough that most people who caught Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Alex the first time around now have grandchildren old enough to buy their own tickets.

Every outlet that covered this in the last three weeks told the nostalgia version: historic Glendale movie palace gets its movies back. That's true, but it undersells what actually happened. The Alex didn't flip a switch back to 1991. It bolted a commercial cinema business onto a performing arts institution that spent 33 years being built, funded, and staffed to do something else entirely. Both halves are now running at the same time, in the same 1,300-seat room, on the same calendar. The first month of ticket sales says that's working. A handful of patron complaints say the seams are still showing.

The Gap Was Structural, Not Just A Long Dry Spell

The Alex opened in 1925 as a neighborhood vaudeville and movie house and screened first-run films through Hollywood's Golden Age. It closed in the 1980s after years of decline. What brought it back wasn't a movie studio. It was the Glendale Redevelopment Agency, which put $6.2 million into restoring the building and reopened it on New Year's Eve 1993, not as a cinema but as a performing arts center meant to anchor downtown's revival.

That distinction matters. For three decades the Alex was purpose-built as a civic venue. It became home to five resident companies: the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles, the Glendale Youth Orchestra, the Alex Film Society, and the Musical Theatre Guild. Together they helped draw more than 130,000 people a year for concerts, dance, comedy, and classic film screenings. The Alex Film Society could run an older print on the equipment already in the building. Landing a current studio release like "The Odyssey," in the format modern audiences expect, was a different job entirely.

So when the City of Glendale announced on July 23 that first-run films were back, the real news wasn't the announcement. It was that someone had to rebuild the cinema half of the building from close to zero.

What It Actually Took

Getting "The Odyssey" onto that screen meant new 35mm and 70mm film projection systems, upgraded audio, and acoustic paneling installed around the back of the auditorium, according to the theatre's own account of the project reported by Outlook Newspapers on Aug. 7. Artistic Director Miles Williams brought in Taylor Umphenour, an IMAX projectionist, to help build a custom projection booth from scratch. Secret Los Angeles put the total restoration cost around $500,000.

Williams framed the goal plainly, telling Outlook the Alex is "reclaiming our place as one of Los Angeles' premier venues for cinema." He also said the acoustic work isn't finished. The current phase addressed the back wall. A second phase, including more carpeting to soften a mostly hard floor, is still coming.

That gap between phase one and phase two is worth sitting with, because it shows up in how the first screenings actually went.

The Numbers Say It Worked. Some Seats Say It's Not Finished.

By the numbers, the launch outperformed expectations. "The Odyssey" was originally booked for three weeks, through Aug. 6. Patch reported on Aug. 5 that the run was extended by at least two weeks, through Aug. 20, after the Alex became the highest-grossing U.S. theater presenting the film in 70mm during its opening run. Theater officials said moviegoers traveled from across Southern California and beyond for the large-format presentation.

That's a real result for a venue that had no first-run film infrastructure before this summer. It's also not the whole story. Reviews posted in the early weeks of the run described uneven experiences in the same auditorium the theater was celebrating. One patron who saw the film on July 27 called the presentation "way too cold, lousy sound system" and said they left early because they couldn't hear the movie. That complaint lines up with exactly what Williams told Outlook was still unresolved: the acoustics are a work in progress, not a finished product.

Neither fact cancels the other out. The Alex sold enough tickets to become the country's top-grossing house for this particular film in this particular format, and some seats in that same house are still cold and hard to hear from. Both things are true of a building mid-renovation that's already open for business.

The Rest Of The Calendar Didn't Clear Out For Movies

If this were a full pivot to commercial cinema, you'd expect the performing arts bookings to thin out. They haven't. The Alex's 2026 calendar still runs concerts, dance, and comedy alongside the new film program. The Angeles Chorale performed Bernstein and Lang there on May 31. Tango Elite staged a full production on June 5. Whose Live Anyway? played a rescheduled date on June 6. Looking ahead, the Georgian National Ballet's Sukhishvili company is booked for Oct. 10.

Cinema is being layered in as its own line item, not swapped in for the old one. The clearest proof is what's booked right after "The Odyssey" closes. Fandango lists a limited engagement of "The Transformers: The Movie" 40th anniversary from Sept. 17 through 21, a nostalgia special rather than a new studio release. That's a theater testing whether repertory and anniversary screenings can hold a slot between first-run bookings, which is a different bet than becoming a full-time multiplex.

How To Actually Use This If You're Nearby

If you want to see a current studio release in 70mm on a screen that hasn't run one since 1991, the window is short. "The Odyssey" is scheduled to close Aug. 20, which as of this writing gives you about a week and a half.

A few practical notes:

• Tickets for "The Odyssey" run $27 through the theatre's own cinema page, which also has current showtimes.
• The Alex sits at 216 N. Brand Blvd. Two garages are built specifically for theater traffic: the Exchange Parking Garage at 115 N. Artsakh Ave. and the Glendale Marketplace Garage at 120 S. Artsakh Ave., both listed on the venue's getting-here page. A larger city-owned garage sits one block west of Brand, on Orange Street.
• The theater is a five-minute walk from dozens of restaurants along Brand Boulevard, and close enough to the Americana at Brand to fold a coffee or an early dinner into the same trip.
• If the sound issues from opening weekend give you pause, know that the acoustic work is described as ongoing. A screening two months from now may sound noticeably different from one three weeks in.

What This Means If You Live Here

This isn't a story about property values or timing a move. It's a story about what happens when a piece of civic infrastructure that's been asked to do one job for three decades gets asked to do a second job at the same time, and mostly pulls it off. We've already mapped how downtown Glendale's summer nights consolidated around one lawn at Brand Library this year. The Alex is a different kind of consolidation: one building, one calendar, two identities that used to take turns and are now sharing the stage.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually changing in this neighborhood, not just what a press release says changed, that's the detail worth carrying into your next Friday night on Brand Boulevard.

If you're thinking further ahead, about what owning a piece of a neighborhood like this actually looks like, Bigtown Homes spends as much time watching Glendale's daily texture as its market data. Schedule a strategy call when you're ready to talk about either one.