SF's First New Movie Theater in a Decade Opens This Fall
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- The Portal Cinema will open at 3293 Mission Street in SF's Mission District this fall, marking the city's first new movie theater in over a decade, and can screen 35mm and 16mm archive prints alongside digital formats.
- Founder Nellie Killian, an SF native returning after two decades in New York, previously programmed at Brooklyn's BAM, Lower Manhattan's Metrograph, the Criterion Channel, the British Film Institute, and Queens' Museum of the Moving Image.
- A Kickstarter campaign is underway with a $250,000 goal to fund an electrical panel upgrade, 35mm projection, and 5.1 sound system ahead of the fall opening.
- SF's theater landscape has contracted sharply: the Landmark-owned Embarcadero Center complex shuttered in 2023, AMC took over the indie Sundance Kabiki a decade ago, and the Castro Theatre reopened this year after nearly being converted into just a live-event venue.
- The Bay Area holds the third-largest concentration of Academy members in the U.S. after New York and Los Angeles, and The Portal will host press screenings, tastemaker events, and awards-season receptions targeting Northern California voters.
- The Portal Cinema is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and will also host community programming alongside new global releases and repertory works.
- SFFILM, the nonprofit behind the annual San Francisco International Film Festival, continues to bring year-round Bay Area programming, setting the ecosystem The Portal is joining.
Why it matters: A film programmer trained at NYC's top repertory houses returns to her hometown to build SF's first new theater in a decade on a previously vacant Mission District lot — directly plugging a gap for Bay Area Academy voters, the nation's third-largest concentration, at a moment when the city's indie cinema landscape has been hollowing out for 15 years.
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