After a year and a half of operating from temporary locations, Grand Illusion Cinema, Seattle’s oldest continuously operating movie theater, has found a new home: the nonprofit has signed a long-term lease for the historic Varsity Theatre on University Way. The main auditorium is expected to open in late fall 2026—tentatively in late November or early December—followed by the gradual reopening of two smaller auditoriums. For the University District, this means more than the return of a familiar marquee: it ends a period in which, for the first time in decades, there were no movie theaters left in the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Washington.
In January, when the Varsity closed after 85 years, its lobby still smelled of popcorn, but the mood was closer to a funeral. The operator, Far Away Entertainment, cited the effects of the pandemic and rising costs. On Jan. 15, 2026, the district’s last three-screen movie theater turned off its projectors. Seven Gables, Grand Illusion’s former location and other theaters that once formed a dense, almost European-style cinema network in the University District had already disappeared.
Now the story has come full circle. The Varsity opened on Oct. 2, 1940, in a remodeled Meister building and originally seated 474 people. By 1947, it had switched to foreign films, becoming one of the city’s first art-house screens. In the mid-1980s, the Seven Gables chain converted it into a three-screen complex. Since then, the theater has weathered ownership changes, the arrival of digital projection and the slow disappearance of independent cinemas from urban life.
Grand Illusion itself grew from a much smaller setting—a former dentist’s office at 50th Street and University Way. In 1970, Randy Finley and his partners opened the 76-seat Movie House, showing foreign films, older movies, silent films and works unlikely to promise box-office returns. In 1979, Paul Doyle renamed the venue Grand Illusion, after Jean Renoir’s film and, as he later explained, the very nature of cinema. Since 2004, the theater has operated as an independent nonprofit supported entirely by volunteers.
Its move was not a voluntary change of scenery. The old theater building was sold in 2023, and in fall 2024 the new landlord declined to renew the lease. The final screenings at the former location took place on Jan. 31, 2025: The New Cinema “Paradiso” and Re-Animator on 35mm film. Grand Illusion then began hosting temporary screenings at Northwest Film Forum, SIFF Film Center and Central Cinema, maintaining its connection with its audience while its leadership searched for a permanent venue.
Choosing the Varsity initially seemed too risky: The space is considerably larger than Grand Illusion’s former auditorium, requiring more money, equipment and audience traffic. But the organization has reasons for cautious optimism. Attendance rose from roughly 9,000 tickets sold in 2022 to more than 20,000 in 2024, its last full year at the former address. The theater plans to invest more than $400,000 of its own funds in the conversion and is raising an additional $200,000 for renovations and its first year of operations.
The lobby and main art deco auditorium will be renovated first, along with the installation of a 4K laser projector and a complete sound recalibration. As soon as the work allows, Grand Illusion plans to bring back 35mm projection, followed by 16mm. In the second phase, the two upstairs auditoriums will open. One will be designed as a tribute to the former cramped, beloved theater, with red velvet curtains and preserved elements of the old interior.
At the landlord’s request, the Varsity sign will remain almost unchanged, but Grand Illusion will program the theaters. The organization promises daily screenings of independent films, classics, genre movies and works from around the world—the same eclectic repertory, but on three screens instead of one. If the plan succeeds, the University District will regain not a museum piece from the city’s past, but an active gathering place: a space where films are still watched not alone in front of a home screen, but in the dark, among strangers who for two hours become one audience.
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