LOS ANGELES — Tourists on Hollywood Boulevard still stop at the same forecourt they've been stopping at since 1922, when Sid Grauman built a theater designed to look like it got airlifted straight out of the Valley of the Kings. More than a century on, the Egyptian Theatre is still standing, still screening movies, and now partly owned by one of the companies most frequently blamed for gutting theaters in the first place.
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Netflix took over operation of the Egyptian in a deal finalized in 2020, then spent roughly two years and a reported eight-figure sum restoring it before reopening in late 2022. The streaming giant now shares the space with the American Cinematheque, the nonprofit that had run public programming there since the late 1990s. It's a strange partnership on paper. A company built on people never leaving their couches just poured millions into a building that only works if people leave the house. That tension is exactly what makes the Egyptian's story worth telling.
The theater opened on Hollywood Boulevard in October 1922, three months before Grauman broke ground on the more famous Chinese Theatre a few blocks west. It's widely credited as the site of Hollywood's first-ever movie premiere. Its Egyptian Revival design, complete with hieroglyph-covered columns and a courtyard modeled loosely on ancient temple complexes, rode the wave of King Tut fever that swept the country after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb that same year. For decades it functioned as a working commercial theater, surviving the silent era, the studio system's collapse, and the multiplex boom that turned single-screen movie palaces into an endangered species.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake nearly finished what changing tastes had started. The temblor cracked the building's structure badly enough that it sat closed for years, one more shuttered relic on a boulevard that by the 1990s had more empty storefronts than working ones. The American Cinematheque, a nonprofit dedicated to exhibiting classic and independent film, took over the lease in 1996 and reopened the theater in 1998 after a renovation funded through a mix of public and private money, including support tied to Hollywood's broader redevelopment push of that era.
For more than 20 years after that, the Cinematheque ran the Egyptian largely as it was built to run: revival screenings, director retrospectives, film festival premieres, the kind of programming for people who still believe seeing a movie on a big screen with strangers is part of the point. Industry premieres came through periodically, but the theater's identity stayed rooted in classic and repertory cinema rather than red-carpet spectacle.
That changed when Netflix entered the picture. The company had already been buying and leasing Los Angeles real estate for years, building out production and post-production capacity across Southern California. Taking a stake in the Egyptian was a different kind of acquisition, more symbolic than operational. But it fit a pattern of streaming companies wanting a physical foothold in the industry's historic core even as their entire business model pulls audiences toward screens at home. Netflix has used the restored theater for premieres of its own films while continuing to allow the American Cinematheque to run public repertory screenings on other nights, according to reporting on the arrangement at the time of the reopening.