Walk down Broxton Avenue this Thursday around noon and you'll find the same thing you'd have found on almost any Thursday for years: card tables loaded with citrus, a line for pupusas, someone's kid chasing a dog past the honey stand. The Westwood Village Farmers' Market runs every Thursday from noon to five on the stretch of Broxton between Kinross and Weyburn, and it has for long enough that nobody bothers checking if it's happening. It just is.
What's different this fall is everything around it. Look up from the produce tables and the Fox tower that has marked this intersection since 1931 is dark. The Village Theatre, the 1,400-seat Spanish Mission landmark that anchored decades of premieres, went quiet this fall for a planned 12-month seismic renovation. Across the street, the Bruin, shuttered since 2024, is about to wake up under a new operator. And on the blocks between them, a run of new restaurants opened without waiting to see how the theater math would shake out.
That's the actual story here, not a list of openings. Westwood is running two different clocks at once this fall: one where its signature movie house goes dark for a full year, and one where new street-level businesses are opening on their own schedule.
The Marquee Goes Dark on Purpose
The Village Theatre spent this summer proving it still had pull. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey played a three-week 70mm run there from July 17 through August 6, one of a handful of events the American Cinematheque staged as a send-off before the building closes for real work. The renovation, backed by a $25 million commitment from a group of filmmakers calling itself the Village Directors Circle, is not cosmetic. When the theater reopens in 2027, it's expected to carry new screening rooms, a bar, and a restaurant built into the same shell that has hosted roughly two dozen premieres a year for most of its history.
The people behind that investment are not incidental. The Circle includes Nolan, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and Jason Reitman, who led the deal to buy the theater from its previous operator. Reitman's group has been public about wanting the building to function as a year-round destination rather than a premiere-only venue, which explains the restaurant and bar going into the renovation plans instead of just new seats and a paint job.
None of that helps you plan a Thursday night in September or October, though. For the length of this renovation, the Village name moves off the marquee and the neighborhood loses its largest single screen.
The Bruin Wakes Up in October
The building across the street has the opposite problem: it's been dark since 2024, not because of construction, but because its previous operator's lease simply ended. That changes this fall. The Bruin, built in 1937 and seating close to 700, is set to reopen in October under Rui Pereira, a Canadian theater operator who also runs Toronto's Kingsway Theatre.
Pereira has said he plans to add both 35mm and 70mm projection and program a mix of first-run releases, classic revivals, and special events, which puts the Bruin in a position to pick up some of the repertory and event programming the Village used to handle. It won't replace the Village's scale. The Bruin is less than half the size. But it means Westwood goes from having one working historic screen this fall to two by the time October ends, just not the two you'd expect.
"It's a magical place," Pereira told Variety of the Bruin, adding that he wants the reopened theater to feel upgraded while keeping the sense of a classic movie house.
The Landmark Westwood on Broxton has kept running through all of this and remains the one screen in the Village that hasn't gone dark at any point. If you've been wondering why movie night planning in Westwood has felt more complicated than usual, this is why: one theater closed for a year, one reopening in a few weeks, and one that never stopped.
What Actually Opened on Broxton and Weyburn This Year
While the theaters have been in flux, the storefronts around them filled in at a pace the Village hasn't seen in years. None of these openings were timed to a theater reopening. Westwood's daytime population, which the Westwood Village Improvement Association put at roughly 130,000 people and 20,000 employees as of 2023, counting UCLA, the medical center, and the surrounding offices, is part of the context for the new storefronts.
| Address | What Opened | Status as of this fall |
|---|---|---|
| Corner of Broxton and Weyburn | Raising Cane's | Opened July 13, 2026, with a ribbon cutting and a $1,000 donation to Friends of Westwood Library |
| 939 Broxton Ave | Sana'a Cafe | Open, a Yemeni coffeehouse in the space BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse vacated in July 2024 |
| 10965 Weyburn Ave | Xibei Eatery | Signage and hiring notices up since April 2026, opening date not yet announced |
| 1061 Broxton Ave | LARACLETTE | Lease confirmed via ABC filing, Swiss raclette concept from owner Domenico Frasca |
| Broxton Avenue (address not yet public) | Jollibee | Lease signed per the WVIA's annual report, opening timeline still undetermined |
That last one is worth sitting with. Jollibee's Westwood arrival has been anticipated by UCLA students for years, and a company representative confirmed in February that a lease exists without committing to a date, noting that other tenants like Raising Cane's took years between signing and opening. If you've been checking that storefront every few weeks expecting news, the honest answer right now is that there isn't any yet.
The Plaza That Makes the Turnover Visible
Part of why this wave of openings feels more noticeable than past ones is that Broxton itself changed shape first. In the fall of 2024, the Westwood Village Improvement Association converted the one-way portion of Broxton Avenue into what's now called Broxton Plaza, roughly 14,000 square feet of pedestrian space, the largest plaza of its kind in the City of Los Angeles and the first one added citywide in five years. It came with turf, string lights, tables, a piano, and enough open room that the new restaurants filling in around it have somewhere for people to actually stand and eat.
A plaza doesn't fill storefronts on its own, but it does explain why six or seven new leases in a single year read as a wave instead of scattered noise. The businesses opening now have a gathering space to open into that didn't exist two years ago.
Thursday Doesn't Need the Movies This Year
Here's where the pieces connect. In past years, a Thursday night in Westwood might have meant checking what was playing at the Village or catching a Hammer Museum program before dinner. This fall, with the Village dark and the Bruin not quite open yet, the neighborhood's Thursday rhythm runs through different anchors entirely.
The farmers market is the most reliable of them, unaffected by any of the theater news because it never depended on the theaters in the first place. The Hammer Museum, three blocks away on Wilshire, remains free every day it's open and continues its regular calendar of talks, screenings, and performances regardless of what's happening at the Village marquee.
The Geffen Playhouse adds its own marker to the calendar this fall. Its 2025/2026 season wrapped in July, and its new season, its third under Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney, opens with a workshop production of Dragon Baby, the final chapter of Sara Porkalob's Dragon Cycle, running September 30 through October 16. The mainstage opener, a Los Angeles debut of the Tony and Pulitzer-winning Purpose with its original Broadway cast directed by Phylicia Rashad, follows in November. The Geffen is also marking its 30th anniversary this year, with a fall event honoring Broadway performer Bebe Neuwirth, NBA veteran Chris Paul, and founding trustee Harold A. Brown.
None of this replaces what the Village Theatre offered. But it means the neighborhood's cultural calendar this fall doesn't have a gap in it so much as a shift in where the activity sits. If you're planning a visit to Westwood between now and when the Bruin opens, the Geffen's season restart and the Thursday market are the two fixed points. Everything else is worth checking the same week you plan to go.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
A few practical notes worth keeping straight through the rest of the fall:
- The Village Theatre will not have movies again until 2027 at the earliest. Plan around that rather than checking back every few weeks.
- The Bruin's October reopening under Rui Pereira is confirmed, though an exact date hadn't been announced as of this writing. Worth watching for.
- Parking at the farmers market is easiest at the Broxton Public Parking Structure, which offers two hours free before 5 p.m. on market days.
- The Geffen's new season starts with a workshop run September 30 through October 16, ahead of its mainstage opener in November.
- If you've been waiting on Jollibee, there's a signed lease and no opening date. Xibei Eatery has signage up on Weyburn but hasn't announced hours either.
Westwood Village isn't quieter this fall. It's just organized around different fixed points than it used to be, and most of them have nothing to do with what's playing at the theater.
If you're a longtime Westwood homeowner curious what a year like this means for your own property, or you're weighing whether now's the time to make a move in this part of the Westside, The Kostrey + Eckert Collection knows this neighborhood block by block. Reach out for a personalized home valuation or a straightforward conversation about what's next.
