The iconic Music Box Theatre in Chicago is adding a third screen

Chicago movie nerds, rejoice: the beloved Music Box Theatre is officially getting bigger.

The nearly 100-year-old Lakeview cinema announced this week that it’s adding a third screening room to its historic Southport Avenue home, giving one of the city’s most treasured movie palaces more room for midnight cult classics, indie darlings, filmmaker Q&As and those three-hour foreign films your one Letterboxd friend keeps insisting will “change your life.”

“We can’t wait for you to meet THEATRE 3📽,” the theater teased in a post shared to X on Wednesday.

While the Music Box hasn’t yet confirmed an exact opening date, plans for the expansion have actually been in the works for a while. The project is being funded in part by a $1.2 million city Community Development Grant, helping turn two long-vacant storefronts just south of the theater’s entrance into a brand-new 115-seat auditorium.

That may sound modest compared to the Music Box’s cavernous 700-seat main theater, but for the staff, the added screen is a huge deal. 

“The third screen will allow us to offer more of what our patrons love and no other venue provides: a diverse mix of classic, independent, cult, documentary and foreign films in a beautiful, historic and welcoming setting,” co-owner and CEO Brody Sheldon said about the project when it was first announced last year.

The expansion will be the first major addition to the theater since its second screen debuted back in 1991. And it comes at a time when the Music Box has been busier than ever, thanks to packed repertory programming, filmmaker events and growing demand from distributors hoping for longer runs.

“We had a number of events and filmmakers come to us last year, and we just didn’t have the space,” Sheldon told Block Club Chicago. “Our calendar was full.”

The project will also include additional bathrooms and some internal reshuffling. Theater 2 will be shortened slightly to create a hallway connecting the lobby to the new auditorium and the new space itself will include a projection booth.

For Chicago moviegoers, the expansion is especially meaningful as independent theaters nationwide continue facing financial pressure and competition from streaming services and giant multiplex chains. The Music Box, which first opened in 1929, has remained one of the city’s most beloved cultural institutions precisely because it feels stubbornly old-school in the best possible way.

Soon, it will just have one more screen to obsess over.