Westwood Village This Fall: What's Actually Open Now

Walk down Broxton Avenue this September and you will pass one historic theater that is about to go dark for a year and, a few doors down, another that has been dark for more than two years and is finally getting a release date. That is not the tidy "restaurant boom" story that every Westwood roundup published this summer. It is a staggered handoff, and if you live here, knowing which half of that handoff is actually true on any given week matters more than any list of new openings.

The two theaters in question sit almost across the street from each other, the way they have since the 1930s. Both went dark on the same day in July 2024, when Regency Theatres' lease on the pair expired. What happens to them next is not happening on the same clock, and that gap is the thing worth understanding before you plan an evening around either one.

The Village goes quiet just as the Bruin wakes up

The theater everyone calls Directors Village now, formerly the Fox Westwood, the Mann Village, the Regency Village Theatre, spent this summer on a kind of victory lap before its next closure. New branding went up in June. On July 11 and 12, the American Cinematheque ran an "Ultra Cinematheque 70" festival there using rehabbed 70mm projectors that once served the Carthay Circle and the Bruin. Then, from July 16 through August 6, the theater hosted a three-week 70mm run of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," a fundraiser orchestrated by Universal Pictures, the American Cinematheque, and the Village Directors Circle, the ownership group led by filmmaker Jason Reitman that also includes Nolan, JJ Abrams, Chloé Zhao, and Steven Spielberg.

That summer run was never meant to be permanent programming. The plan, according to the Westwood Village Improvement Association's Michael Russell, has always been a fall closure for a roughly $25 million seismic retrofit that adds new screening rooms, a bar, a full restaurant, and a gallery space for filmmakers. The theater, built in 1930 and first opened in 1931 in Spanish Mission style, is aiming for a full reopening under long-term operator American Cinematheque sometime in 2027. Until then, the marquee that just spent a summer showing Nolan in 70mm is set to go dark again.

Across the street, the opposite is happening. The Bruin, shuttered since the same July 2024 lease expiration, has a new tenant. Toronto-based exhibitor Rui Pereira, who ran the Kingsway Theatre for 18 years and before that the Humber Cinema, signed a lease with the Martyn Skouras family, descendants of former 20th Century Fox president Spyros Skouras, who own the building. Variety reported the Bruin is aiming for a mid-October reopening, with Pereira restoring both 70mm and 35mm projection alongside digital upgrades.

Line up those two timelines and you get a stretch this fall, somewhere between the Odyssey run ending in early August and the Bruin's mid-October target, where neither of Westwood's two historic single-screen houses is showing anything. Once the Bruin does come back online, it will be running its own restored 70mm and 35mm prints just as the Village goes into a year of construction. For a stretch that could run into 2027, the historic theater experience in Westwood belongs to the Bruin, not the building most people still call the Village.

The restaurant list you already read is out of date

Every summer post about Westwood ran some version of the same restaurant lineup, and most of them are still treating that list as current. Some of it is. Some of it already isn't.

What is confirmed and actually open right now: Xibei Eatery at 10965 Weyburn, a fast-casual outpost of the Silver Lake noodle spot Xibei Dumplings, is drawing lines of UCLA students for hand-pulled noodles and shumai. Milksha, the Taiwanese bubble tea chain making its first U.S. storefront push, opened at 1009 Broxton on May 7 with a line that reportedly stretched down the block. Raising Cane's opened its second Westside location at Broxton and Weyburn on July 13, marking the day with a ribbon cutting and a $1,000 donation to Friends of Westwood Library. Sana'a Cafe, the Yemeni coffee house taking over the former BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse space at 939 Broxton, which sat empty after BJ's closed in July 2024, has also been pouring Sana'ani coffee and qishr at that address.

What is signed but genuinely not open yet, with real target dates: Bread Head, the focaccia sandwich shop from Trois Mec alumni Alex Williams and Jordan Snyder, has co-founder Greg Willsey targeting the second half of September for its 1136 Westwood Blvd location, its third after Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach, pending final city and health permits. The Melt has window paper up at 913 Westwood Blvd with a fall opening planned but no firm date. LARACLETTE, an Alpine raclette concept from owner Domenico Frasca, filed an ABC application for 1061 Broxton in late August, which is still early enough that a menu and opening date remain unannounced.

Here is what most of those roundups miss entirely. Bruxie, the waffle sandwich chain, is still being introduced in some current write-ups as "coming soon." It opened at 1114 Gayley Avenue back on November 6, 2024. It has been serving chicken tenders and custard shakes in Westwood for almost two years. If a restaurant list is still calling that one new, everything else on the list deserves a second look too.

And here is the catch that matters most if you are the type to book a table before you walk over. Wolfsglen, the New American restaurant at 1071 Glendon Avenue that every summer post described as Westwood's live jazz Friday, handmade pasta anchor, is permanently closed. It had been open since late 2022, built a genuine following, and drew praise for its Friday night jazz and its nod to Westwood pioneer John Wolfskill in its name. As of August 2026, the OpenTable listing shows the restaurant offline, and a Yelp review from a party that showed up to a locked door and an eviction notice dated June 18 confirms the closure. Nearly four years in this corridor was not enough to guarantee survival.

That is the real contrast worth sitting with. Eduardo's, the Mexican restaurant that has fed generations of UCLA students on Westwood Boulevard, came close to closing at the end of 2025 and instead was bought by the owners of Cofax, who kept the staff, the recipes, and the name intact. A restaurant that almost died got a second life because its identity still pulled foot traffic. A restaurant that spent nearly four years building a following from scratch is gone. Longevity in this stretch of Westwood does not track neatly with quality or popularity. It tracks with whoever owns the lease and what they decide the space is worth.

What this actually means if you live here

None of this adds up to the clean story of a neighborhood on an upward trajectory that every summer post wanted to tell. It adds up to a district where the churn runs in both directions at once, on a timeline that changes week to week, and where a post published in July is already wrong about at least two facts by September. The theater you think is the one to watch is about to close. The theater you'd forgotten about is the one reopening. The restaurant everyone is still calling new has been open for two years. The restaurant everyone keeps recommending is gone.

If you're planning a weeknight around a screening or a dinner reservation, the safest move is to check the specific business directly before you go, not the last roundup you read, including this one a few months from now. If you're the kind of resident who tracks this corridor because you're thinking about your own place in it, that same granular, address-by-address attention is what a good local partner should bring to the conversation. May-Ann Fisher tracks these shifts across Westwood and the rest of the Westside block by block, not season by season. Book a consultation whenever you're ready to talk about where you actually live.