Picturehouse Cinemas

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Picturehouse Cinemas is a network of cinemas in the United Kingdom, operated by Picturehouse Cinemas Ltd^[1] and owned by Cineworld.^[2] The company runs its own film distribution arm, Picturehouse Entertainment,^[3] which has released acclaimed films such as Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker and Monster, Scrapper, Corsage, Sally Potter's The Party, Francis Lee's God's Own Country and The Wife. A previous iteration of this distribution arm, which focused largely on alternative content, was sold in 2017 to Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire and rebranded as Trafalgar Releasing.^[4]

The first cinema in the chain, Phoenix Picturehouse, opened in Oxford in 1989, but many of the others operated independently before then:^[5] the Duke of York's Picture House in Brighton, for example, opened in 1910 and is Britain's longest continually operating cinema.

On 17 March 2020, Picturehouse and all other movie cinema companies in the UK temporarily closed their UK cinemas, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,^[6] reopening them on 31 July. A second closure took place from 9 October 2020 until 17 May 2021, due to an insufficient amount of new film releases and a second wave of the pandemic closing indoor venues.^[7]

In 2022 their parent company Cineworld filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States,^[8] but on July 31 2023, the company and certain of its subsidiaries successfully completed their financial restructuring process and emerged from their Chapter 11 cases.