Alamo Drafthouse Cinema opens in Crystal City

Washington Business Journal

By Daniel J. Sernovitz

October 26, 2022

The curtains have finally risen on the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Crystal City, more than five years after the Austin, Texas-based movie theater chain signed on as the anchor retail tenant in JBG Smith Properties’ (NYSE: JBGS) larger Central District redevelopment.

A lot has happened since then, including JBG’s transition from a privately held company into the publicly traded real estate investment trust that landed HQ2, Amazon.com Inc.’s second headquarters, one of Greater Washington’s biggest economic development deals in a generation. Logistical issues, including design changes meant to accommodate the e-commerce and cloud computing giant’s space needs, kept theater co-owners Anthony Coco and Joseph Edwards from being able to open before the start of the pandemic as they’d hoped. Then, of course, came the coronavirus outbreak, which had a profound impact on the movie industry that’s slowly rebounding to pre-pandemic levels. The stuff of movies, right?

“I think that there’s a lot of folks that have known we were coming, but I don’t know that they know we’re about to open,” Edwards told the Washington Business Journal ahead of Monday’s soft opening. “We didn’t want to finish a building that didn’t make sense during Covid, so we figured it out, working with JBG, and here we are. I think it’s a good time to open.”

Read the full story here.