Hollywood’s 100-year-old Egyptian Theatre is reopening this week after a $70m renovation from Netflix, with the streaming giant planning to use the lavish location as a venue for premieres and events.
The Egyptian, which hosted Hollywood’s first-ever movie premiere in 1922, will screen classic movies on the weekends, programmed by American Cinemateque, the non-profit which previously owned the theater. During the week, it will host screenings for Netflix, which purchased the building in 2020.
The theater has hosted some of Los Angeles’s most star-studded film premieres, from Ben-Hur to My Fair Lady to the Return of the Jedi, going back all the way to the original October 1922 red-carpet premiere for Robin Hood, a silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks. Photos from 1922 show excited crowds massed around the theater, with trumpeters serenading them.
Speaking at a preview event on Monday in advance of the reopening, the Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, said that the restoration of the Egyptian was a way for the leaders of Netflix, who are still “relative newcomers in Hollywood history”, to show that “we do love this history”.
“It’s important to give back to the industry that’s given so much to us,” he added, calling the Egyptian one of America’s “temples of storytelling”.
The debut of Netflix’s $70m restoration comes as Hollywood actors remain on strike, in a labor action sparked in large part by the economic disruptions caused by the rise of Netflix’s online streaming model. There’s a certain irony to Netflix, whose business model has resulted in many people watching films alone on their laptops and phones, releasing a 10-minute documentary about the Egyptian that celebrates the unmatched power of watching movies collectively on a giant screen.
It’s not the first time that Netflix has acquired a historic movie theater as a place to host events and show its commitment to industry traditions. In 2019, the company made a similar deal to restore and reopen New York’s Paris Theater, an old arthouse theater and the last single-screen cinema in Manhattan.
Sarandos said on Monday that restoring old movie theaters, like many home renovation projects, “takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you would expect”.
But, he said, “Over the years, everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Audrey Hepburn to Marlon Brando sat in the seats where you’re sitting.”
The 101-year-old theater, an ornate fantasia on Egyptian themes, has plenty of fans. The film-maker Guillermo del Toro praised it in Netflix’s mini-documentary as “a grand alley to a different reality”.
Neema Wangyal, 23, a film buff and one of the theater’s new employees, called the Egyptian’s legacy “as Hollywood as it gets”.
The renovation has restored some of the historic aspects of the theater, like the retro neon sign outside; the jeweled auditorium ceiling, adorned with lotus flowers, ibis and an Egyptian scarab; and the murals and elaborate fountain in the front courtyard, while also reducing the number of seats inside to 516.
The Egyptian is also now one of five theaters in the US capable of screening historic movies shot on extremely delicate and flammable nitrate film.
Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1922, not long before the excavation of King Tut’s tomb by a British archaeologist sparked a cultural craze focused on ancient Egypt. In the following years, at least 11 other Egyptian-themed theaters would open across the US, some of which remain in operation.
In the theater’s early years, a staffer dressed like a Bedouin guard would walk back and forth across the roof, adding to the drama of the setting.
The theater was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which left gaping holes in the building. Part of the challenge of restoring it over the years has been that the theater was constructed much like a Hollywood set: the busts of two pharaohs overlooking an elaborate wooden gate were made of plaster and chicken wire, Bill Kelly, a volunteer tour guide, said, and the gate itself is a gate to nowhere, opening to a solid brick wall.
The Egyptian was built by the same local impresario, Sid Grauman, who would later construct the now more famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with the courtyard where celebrities record their handprints and footprints in cement.
The theater will officially reopen on 9 November with a sold-out screening of the Netflix film The Killer, directed by David Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender.
