The Movie Chain Hoping to Steal Netflix Customers With Pizza and Beer

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez first heard about the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema at a party in Austin in the late 1990s when he met its founders, Tim and Karrie League. The young couple had just arrived in Texas, fresh off their initial foray into the movie theater business. A few years earlier, they’d quit their post-college jobs and bought a single-screen art-house cinema in Bakersfield, Calif., which they swiftly and lovingly ran into the ground. Lessons learned, they were ready to try again. In 1997 the Leagues opened the original Drafthouse in Austin in an erstwhile parking garage. The hook: Customers could order food and drinks at their seats while watching second-run movies, foreign films, and classics.

In the years that followed, Rodriguez watched as Drafthouse expanded across town, opening four more venues, bulking up its menu, and adding first-run releases. The city’s indie film scene was booming, stocked by a steady stream of graduates from the University of Texas at Austin’s renowned film school and invigorated by recent, locally shot hits such as Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. The Drafthouse fast won favor with the city’s fussy denizens. In between the standard action flicks and rom-coms, it let its inner film geek run wild. It staged all-day marathons of genre films hosted by directors such as Quentin Tarantino. It paired movies with specialty tasting menus, like Lawrence of Arabia with a Bedouin feast. It screened Jaws for an audience of people floating on inner tubes on a nearby lake.