The final showing at the Regency Calabasas Commons was Zootopia 2, 7:20 p.m., December 28, 2025. Six screens, one last audience, then the lights came up for good. The theater had opened in 1998 as the Edwards Grand Palace Stadium 6, survived a 2022 bankruptcy closure, reopened under new ownership that Christmas, and then closed again three years later to make way for apartments. Its own farewell message on social media kept it simple.
"It has been our pride and pleasure to serve the Calabasas community."
Here's the detail that didn't get much attention outside a KTLA news brief: with that theater gone, there is no longer a movie theater anywhere between Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village in Ventura County and the Woodland Hills stretch of the San Fernando Valley. Not a smaller one, not a discount one. None. For a corridor this dense with rooftops, that's an unusual gap, and it's the kind of fact a resident notices only when they actually try to book a Friday night ticket and can't find one closer than a twenty-minute drive.
If you've lived here through 2026, you've probably already absorbed the theater's disappearance as background noise. What's easy to miss is what filled the vacuum, because it isn't one thing in one place. It's three separate restaurant stories that happened to land in the same twelve months, in three different corners of town that don't share a parking lot, a mall entrance, or even a zip code feel. The theater used to be the one place everybody in Calabasas could name without thinking. Its replacement isn't a place. It's a spread.
Three nodes, three timelines
Start with The Commons at Calabasas itself, the Caruso-built retail center where the theater sat. The Calabasas City Council gave final approval to the redevelopment plan back in December 2023, after roughly two years of resident meetings, and the version that got built was already scaled down from the original pitch of more than 100 apartments to 80. Some of the new construction will reach 85 feet, with additional buildings in the parking lot rising as high as 46 feet, both taller than anything currently standing on the property. As of this summer, the developer's own project updates describe the July through September 2026 window as the phase where construction crews are handing spaces over to new tenants for buildout, while the parking structure for the apartments moves forward in parallel. The apartments themselves aren't expected to finish until fall 2027, but the plan calls for the new shops and restaurants, somewhere between 12 and 14 of them, to open well before that, roughly midway through the project. Barnes & Noble, Ralphs, and Rite Aid aren't going anywhere. Superba Food + Bread, the California brasserie that already anchors the property, isn't either. The theater's absence is the one visible hole in an otherwise unchanged shopping center that's quietly rebuilding around it.
Then there's Old Town Calabasas, the historic stretch along Calabasas Road that has nothing to do with the Caruso property. This is where Jon & Vinny's, the California-Italian spot from chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, opened on July 27 at 23538 Calabasas Road, directly across from Sagebrush Cantina. It's handmade pastas and wood-fired pizza in a diner-style room, and it landed in a stretch that already had The Mulholland and 10 Speed Coffee working the daytime and evening crowd. Yume Sushi Bar also added a second Old Town location this year, its arrival tracked mostly through local social accounts rather than a formal press release, which is its own small signal: this corner of town is filling in fast enough that not every opening gets a news story.
The third node is the least glamorous and probably the most telling. On Las Virgenes Road near the 101, Salsa & Beer, a family-run Mexican grill with existing locations in Lake Balboa and three spots in North Hollywood, has spent the better part of six years trying to open in the long-vacant former Coco's space at 4895 Las Virgenes Road. The project was first proposed back in 2020, sat empty through the pandemic, and only recently cleared the city's sign-off for restaurant use at that address after neighbors raised concerns at public hearings about traffic and parking on a parcel that sits right next to the freeway. As of June 2026, signage was up, owner Gabriel Huerta told reporters the buildout was nearly finished, and there was still no confirmed opening date. It's the slowest of the three stories, and also the clearest example of how much friction a single restaurant can absorb before it ever serves a plate of food in this town.
Here's how those three add up:
| Node | What's already there | What changed in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| The Commons at Calabasas | Barnes & Noble, Ralphs, Rite Aid, Superba Food + Bread | Movie theater demolished; 12-14 new shops and restaurants under construction, apartments finishing fall 2027 |
| Old Town Calabasas (Calabasas Road) | Sagebrush Cantina, The Mulholland, 10 Speed Coffee | Jon & Vinny's opened July 27; Yume Sushi Bar added a second location |
| Las Virgenes Road near the 101 | Long-vacant former Coco's space | Salsa & Beer finishing a buildout six years in the making, no firm open date yet |
Why the spread matters more than any single opening
A roundup of new restaurants isn't much of a story on its own. Towns get new restaurants constantly. What makes this one worth naming is the timing against the theater's closure. For nearly three decades, the Commons theater was the default answer to "where should we go tonight" for anyone within a ten-minute drive, precisely because it was the one indoor, weather-proof, always-open anchor that didn't require picking a side of town. Its replacement isn't functioning that way. Nobody is going to treat Jon & Vinny's on Calabasas Road as interchangeable with a taco order at Salsa & Beer off the 101, and neither of those maps neatly onto whatever eventually opens in the Commons' new retail wing. The town gained more dining options this year than it lost in entertainment options, but it lost the thing that made "let's just go" a one-word decision.
That's a real shift in the texture of a Friday night here, and it's the kind of shift that shows up in daily habits before it shows up in any headline. If your evenings used to default to the Commons because the theater made the decision for you, this year is the first time in a long while that decision actually requires picking a direction. Old Town leans toward a walkable, patio-and-live-music evening built around Sagebrush Cantina's existing calendar. The Commons still works if you want a sure thing, even mid-construction, since the developer has been explicit that the property stays open and functional through every phase. Las Virgenes Road is the wildcard, worth checking on once Salsa & Beer finally locks in a date, since a family-run grill with an established following elsewhere in the Valley tends to draw a crowd fast once the doors open.
None of this changes property values or school boundaries or anything a market report would track. What it changes is the answer to a question every resident here asks more often than they'd admit: where do the people I know actually end up on a given night. For most of the last three decades, there was one answer. Now there are three, and none of them talk to each other yet.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property you own or are considering in Calabasas, whether it's proximity to Old Town's evening scene, the Commons' ongoing redevelopment, or the quieter corridor along Las Virgenes Road, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal detail worth discussing directly. Michael Bloom has lived this market long enough to know which of these three nodes will matter most to a given buyer or seller, and why. Schedule a Confidential Consultation to talk through it.
