Philadelphia Film Society unveils renovation of its Chestnut Street centerpiece theater

The Philadelphia Film Society (PFS) unveiled the $1.6 million renovation of its centerpiece theater at 1412 Chestnut St. on Wednesday morning, just in time for the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

The nonprofit completely remade the lobby and concession area, adding double doors, a street-facing box office, and a new Americans with Disabilities Act accessible entrance. The former circular wheelchair accessible ramp that crowded the limited lobby space has been torn out.

“When we started this project, we wanted it to be more open [and] have more light. We wanted it to feel spacious,” said J. Andrew Greenblatt, CEO of the film society. “The whole point of film is community … and we had to open [the first floor] up to get there.”

At the end of last year, PFS launched a campaign to raise $4 million for their capital needs and brought in $3.6 million. The fundraising for this second phase of the Chestnut Street renovation project came from state grants from Harrisburg, the Wyncote Foundation, and corporate and private donations.

And the film society isn’t close to done yet, with additional projects in the pipeline, ongoing fundraising, and another request out for access to Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program.

The nonprofit is now raising money to remake the Chestnut Street theater’s basement bathrooms and hallways, an ambitious $5 million roof deck theater above, and $1.2 million more for PFS’s East and Bourse theaters.

“The thing I want to do the most is the furthest away because the roof deck would be very expensive,” Greenblatt said.

PFS would have to build supportive steel beams through the building to preserve the Chestnut Street structure as it is while strengthening the roof to hold a 175-person theater and reception area.

“It’s always in my mind because that is something that I think would be so special and so unique in this city,” Greenblatt said. “We continue to source potential supporters for that.”

The project comes amid a surge of interest, with 206,000 filmgoers across the nonprofit’s three theaters in 2024 — well above 2023’s 155,000 — and attendance on track to outstrip those numbers this year. The year also has seen the highest PFS membership count ever: 4,000, well above the previous year’s 2,770.

The 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival begins Oct. 16 with a screening of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, with director Rian Johnson in attendance.

Other highlights include new films by Chloé Zhao, Guillermo del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos, Noah Baumbach, and Bradley Cooper.

The season finale of HBO’s Task, set in Delaware County, will be shown on the big screen on Oct. 19, followed by a panel featuring some of the show’s talent, from both in front of and behind the camera.

“Now that we have reopened the building, we’re going to make very good use of it,” said Michael Lerman, PFS’s Los Angeles-based artistic director. “It’s one of our most stacked festivals.”

Through the end of the year, PFS is also running a full retrospective of David Lynch, a filmmaker with complicated ties to Philadelphia who died earlier this year. He lived in the Callowhill area during the city’s doldrums in the 1960s and ’70s, and the grotesque and faded industrial landscape is reflected in his hugely influential debut Eraserhead.

According to Lerman, PFS will be only the third theater to show Lynch’s 18-episode final work, Twin Peaks: The Return, on the big screen.

That’s just a slice of the repertory films that are on offer, which Greenblatt says make up the overwhelmingly majority of the films shown at the Chestnut Street theater — a burgeoning trend in the movie theater industry since the pandemic.

“Here it is like 95% curated, not new films, and people are still coming in droves,” Greenblatt said. “The increase year-to-year over the last three has been incredible.”

The film society wants to remake the East and Bourse theaters, although they are tenants at those locations so are more limited in the changes PFS can make in those locations.

PFS spent $1 million on digital projectors, a refashioned concession area, and escalator repair at the Bourse when the society acquired it in 2021. The East was a turnkey operation, and little has changed there since the nonprofit acquired it in 2022.

The two theaters were part of the Landmark chain, which had three theaters in Old City before the pandemic. Now the company owns only the nearby Ritz Five, with PFS running the other two.

Greenblatt shot down any suggestion that PFS could acquire the Ritz Five.

“It is a Landmark theater. They own the bricks. They have no interest in going anywhere,” he said. “The answer is: You never know, but it is not in the immediate cards.”

Further changes to Chestnut Street could include experiments with selling hot food at the concession counter, which will feature plenty of locally sourced options including pretzels, beer, candy, and, possibly, ice cream.

But Greenblatt said PFS has no plans to make changes to the theater that emulate trends in the larger industry, such as larger and more expensive seats or food brought to customers while they watch. PFS also will not be installing 4DX, which brings shaking seats and other practical effects to the moviegoing experience.

“No massive chairs to make the seat count smaller,” Lerman said. “I miss when theaters weren’t 40 seats, because to us, film is a communal experience. You need to have more people here.”