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The Highland Theatre, a 1925 neighborhood landmark in Highland Park, went dark in February 2024, just days shy of its 100th birthday, another pandemic-era casualty in a city where cinema increasingly lives on couches and tablets. Now, actress Kristen Stewart is betting that a grand old theater still has something urgent to say.
Stewart quietly purchased the Highland in mid-2025 and has been candid about why. “I didn’t realize I was looking for a theater until this place came to my attention,” she told Architectural Digest in a feature published this week. “Then it was like a gunshot went off and the race was on.”
The building, which is both noble and battered (yet still unmistakably theatrical), was designed by architect Lewis Arthur Smith, whose other mid-1920s projects include the Los Feliz's Vista Theatre and the El Portal Theatre. It opened with vaudeville acts and a personal appearance by Norma Shearer and over the decades evolved with the neighborhood, eventually operating as a budget-friendly triplex.
What Stewart wants to do now goes beyond a cosmetic restoration. In the Architectural Digest interview, she talks about the Highland as a place to “gather and scheme and dream together,” a community-centered home for adventurous cinema that isn’t governed by box-office math or studio calendars. In other words: less megaplex, more clubhouse.
The original bones are still there, including an ornate mezzanine and a long-dormant stage, but bringing them back will be a heavy lift. The lobby was partially stripped during a 2025 Netflix shoot and decades of deferred maintenance are obvious. Stewart isn’t pretending otherwise. “The place is falling down,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “We definitely need a lot of help, but it’s worth it.”
Moviegoing in Los Angeles has been under pressure well before last year’s wildfires and ongoing production slowdowns. While filmmakers are struggling to get projects made, independent theaters struggle to keep the lights on. Stewart’s acquisition places her alongside a small but growing group of filmmakers taking preservation into their own hands—following Quentin Tarantino’s revival of the Vista and Jason Reitman’s Westwood Village Theater project.
For Stewart, a native Angeleno who has been vocal about the city’s cultural and social contradictions, the Highland is also philosophical. She’s spoken openly about supporting the Downtown Women’s Center and about resisting what she calls the corporatization of movie culture. Saving a theater, in her view, is part of that same fight: protecting spaces where people sit together, watch together and argue afterward.
There’s no reopening date yet and no glossy renderings, so for now, the marquee stays dark—but the idea behind it is very much alive: that Los Angeles still needs rooms like this and that cinema works best when it’s shared.