A24 is getting into the theater business with the purchase of the Off-Broadway venue Cherry Lane Theatre for the purchase price was $10 million, according to a deed filed on Friday.
Cherry Lane Theatre is the longest continuously running theater in New York City’s West Village. It features a 179-seat mainstage and a 60-seat studio theater. The space will reportedly be maintained as a place for live theater.
The studio behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Uncut Gems,” “Hereditary” and “Lady Bird” raised a $225 million equity round in March of last year, with plans to use the money to produce and distribute films while also continuing to develop initiatives beyond just big-screen cinema.
The Cherry Lane Theatre was first established as a playhouse in 1923, courtesy of Evelyn Vaughn, William Rainey, Reginald Travers and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The theater would feature works by the likes of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee and W.H Auden.
Executive director Angelina Fiordellisi, who acquired the theater in 1996 through a corporation titled Little Goddess, agreed to sell the theater to the Lortel Theatre Foundation in July 2021 amid financial troubles. However, a disagreement about the price of the property in relation to the $11 million price tag caused the deal to fall through. By November 2021, the property was back on the market with a new asking price of $12.95 million.
A24, which had been making moves into buying the theater as of late last year, is not the first movie studio to take an interest in small, independent theaters. Streaming giant Netflix signed a long-term lease for the single-screen Paris theater in 2019. The streaming giant has been keeping the theater running with special events, screenings and its own films. They also bought an ownership stake in the Egyptian movie theater in Los Angeles.
The Paris is currently showing Idris Elba’s “Luther: The Fallen Sun” in advance of the feature-film continuation of the popular British crime-solving show debuting on Netflix on March 10, 2023. The Paris offers a regular slate of repertory screenings and periodic theatrical exhibitions of Netflix features like “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Curbed first reported the news of the sale.
