Entertainment
Sony Pictures buys dine-in movie theater chain Alamo Drafthouse
Sony Pictures Entertainment has purchased Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the innovative dine-in movie theater chain known as a prime cinephile destination, including at its location in downtown Los Angeles.
The Culver City-based studio said Wednesday that the quirky, Austin, Texas-based exhibition company will be housed under its newly established Sony Pictures Experiences division, helmed by Alamo Drafthouse’s Michael Kustermann. Kustermann will continue his role as chief executive of the cinema chain.
Sony did not disclose the price of the deal but promised to “preserve Alamo Drafthouse’s distinctive movie-dining experience.” The exhibitor — which boasts 35 locations in major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Austin and New York — is known for serving food and craft beer at its theaters.
It’s also famed for its strict no-texting policy and its special screenings, which made it a haven for movie buffs. The chain regularly hosts themed “movie parties” inspired by certain titles. (Upcoming movie-party screenings at the Los Angeles venue include 2007’s “Hot Fuzz,” 1984’s “Purple Rain” and 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz.”)
“Alamo Drafthouse’s differentiated movie-going experience, admired brand and devoted community fit well with this vision,” said Ravi Ahuja, president and COO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in a statement. “We look forward to building upon the innovations that have made Alamo Drafthouse successful and will, of course, continue to welcome content from all studios and distributors.”
Alamo Drafthouse says it is the seventh-largest theater chain in North America. In a limited sense, Sony’s acquisition of Alamo is a flashback to Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the major studios also owned and operated their own theater chains, thereby controlling production, distribution and exhibition.
This vertical integration system triggered a major antitrust case that resulted in a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively broke up the studio oligopolies. In a series of settlements known as the Paramount decrees, the studios agreed to divest their theater assets.
During the Trump administration, however, the Justice Department sunset the decrees, determining them to be out of date.
Today, entertainment companies control production, distribution and exhibition in a different sense: Most of the major studios’ parent companies own streaming services. Sony is the only top studio without a mass-market streamer to compete with Netflix, though it offers some niche direct-to-consumer services, including anime outlet Crunchyroll.
Restrictions on studios owning theaters thawed in the decades after the decrees.
In the early 1980s, Columbia Pictures (now Sony Pictures) acquired a minority stake in Walter Reade Organization. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. owned the Mann theater chain for many years. Disney has long operated Hollywood Boulevard’s El Capitan, where it screens its movies and hosts special events. Netflix acquired the famed Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard from American Cinematheque, as well as the Bay Theater in Pacific Palisades, where it also screens its own movies.
Under Sony, Alamo Drafthouse will keep all of its existing locations, including its only theater in California, which opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2019.
The studio acquired the exhibitor from private equity firms Altamont Capital Partners, Fortress Investment Group and founder Tim League, who launched Alamo Drafthouse with a single-screen Austin repertory theater with his wife, Karrie, in 1997.
Like many theater operators, Alamo Drafthouse struggled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered cinemas for months. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2021, citing pandemic-related woes.
It emerged from bankruptcy under the ownership of a group of senior creditors, which included Altamont and Fortress.
“We are excited to make history with Sony Pictures Entertainment and have found the right home and partner for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema,” Kustermann said in a statement. “We were created by film lovers for film lovers. We know how important this is to Sony, and it serves as further evidence of their commitment to the theatrical experience.”
Movie Reviews
Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
Entertainment
Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day
Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.
An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.
“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”
The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.
Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”
Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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