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![]() ![]() "There are a lot of ways people can watch movies now: You can watch them on your phone, you can watch them at home on a giant screen - but people inherently want to get out of the house every once in a while and as long as we have an offering that’s entertaining, and we make this whole experience for people amazing, people will choose to go here as opposed to going to a skating rink or going to a bar." "There’s been doom and gloom spelled for movie theaters since the '50s," said League. In an era of media proliferation, when nearly anyone can watch a movie on their smartphone while waiting for a bus, opening old-school movie theaters seems almost crazy. In 2009 the first Alamo Drafthouse opened outside of Texas, in Winchester, Va., and theaters are under construction in San Francisco, Denver and New York. Both new Houston complexes are scheduled to open next year. Alamo has expanded beyond the city limits with three theaters in San Antonio, one in the Valley and one in the Houston area, at Mason Park in Katy, with two more on the way in Midtown - Alamo's first inside-the-loop location in Houston - and in the Vintage Park Shopping Center off of Tomball Parkway and Luetta Road. And a lot of the principles and ideas and values of the company are based upon being a movie fan and wanting this place to be a haven for fellow movie fans," he says.Īlamo Drafthouse now boasts five theaters in Austin showing films on 27 screens. ![]() "Most movie theaters aren’t run by movie fans. "People inherently want to get out of the house every once in a while and as long as we have an offering that’s entertaining, and we make this whole experience for people amazing, people will choose to go here as opposed to going to a skating rink or going to a bar." That potential grew from League's vision, now augmented by his wife, Karrie. Once it started then we got to see the potential of what we could do with it if it really did get quite a bit bigger." "A chain of events happened that almost forced us into expansion in the first place. We didn’t have any plans or designs beyond opening and operating a single screen theater and being very hands on, very mom and pop." But Alamo Drafthouse Cinema would not stay simple and small. "The first thought with opening up the 409 Colorado theater was that this was it. But that experience fueled League's innovative side and that little single screen led to the revolution that now carries mythological status - starting with another single screen theater in Austin in 1997. He did, and it did - failed that is, just two years later. I thought about the idea, 'what if I fail, what would I lose if it went horribly awry.' I think being comfortable with that worst case scenario, as long as you go into it, knowing your OK if everything turns our terribly, then fine, go ahead and do it." I didn’t have any obligations, I wasn’t married, I did come to grips with the worst case scenario. I was 23 when we opened up the first theater. ![]() League says he thought a lot about what would happen if his Tejon theater venture failed. And so that was the light bulb that went off when I passed the theater - it was like, 'I think I can do this.'" It never dawned on me that that was anything more than what you did on the weekends. "I was also a pretty avid movie fan all the way from high school all the way through college, it’s just what we did.
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