Kristen Stewart admitted she purchased a 100-year-old movie theater in “a desperate move,” but assured fans that they didn’t want to miss out on the cinema experience.

During Monday’s episode of “The Tonight Show,” the actress, who was promoting her new film “The Wrong Girls,” explained to host Jimmy Fallon what inspired her to save the historic Highland Theatre in Los Angeles’ Highland Park.

“Honestly, it was kind of like a desperate move. Like, a slightly foolhardy thing,” Stewart said. “But I was just like, imagine if this thing became like, a f–king Urban Outfitters or something. I would be so sad.”

As Stewart went on, she took umbrage with the way things are “changing all the time.”

“I think there was like, a moment where people were thinking movies were like, dead. Or the theater experience wasn’t going to be like, the thing anymore,” she added. “It’s like, where did you first do anything? Didn’t you make out in [the movies]. You want to hang out in the dark.”

Stewart also touted the building as one that’s withstood the test of time, sharing, “The layers of decades that they have not cleaned out. Like, you just go, ‘Oh my god! The ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s.”

Stewart’s update for the Highland Theatre – which first opened in 1925 as a vaudeville venue and movie house —  came six months after it was revealed that the “Twilight” alum had scooped up the storied space.

As we reported at the time, Stewart purchased the property with the plan to revive the over a century-old movie palace and reimagine it as a community-driven cinema space.

“Making films is a political act,” Stewart said in a statement to media. “You have to decide how you want to wield your presence and your voice.”

She added: “I didn’t realize I was looking for a theater until this place came to my attention. Then it was like a gunshot went off and the race was on. I ran toward it with everything I had.”

Stewart also explained in February that her plans extended beyond a straightforward restoration, noting, “It’s an opportunity to make a space to gather and scheme and dream together. We want to make it a family affair, something for the community. It’s not just for pretentious Hollywood cinephiles.”

Stewart maintained that the theater would be “an antidote to all the corporate bulls–t.”

 The Highland Theatre isn’t the only historic cinema to be saved in 2026, as Sony Pictures Entertainment confirmed last month that they would restore and reopen Hollywood’s iconic Cinerama Dome.

Ann Hui, the Hong Kong New Wave pioneer whose films have chronicled the lives of her city’s ordinary and overlooked for nearly half a century, will receive the 2026 Camellia Award at the Busan International Film Festival, presented in partnership with Chanel.

The 79-year-old director will accept the prize — awarded to filmmakers who have advanced the standing of women in the industry — at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 6 at the Busan Cinema Center.

“In my previous years I felt unwilling to receive such taking-stock prizes because I wished to continue making movies,” Hui said in a statement. “Now that I’m nearly eighty and find it difficult to make a film, I think the prize comes just in time for me to appreciate it more.”

Since her 1979 debut The Secret, Hui has directed 27 features and two feature-length documentaries. Her work helped define the Hong Kong New Wave, with films that move across genres but return to her perennial theme — the struggles of everyday life at the margins, portrayed without sentiment: Vietnamese refugees in Boat People (1982), a daughter’s reckoning with her Japanese mother in Song of the Exile (1990), the small dignities of working-class life in The Way We Are (2008), an aging servant and the family she raised in A Simple Life (2011).

Hui is already one of the most decorated directors of her generation. She has won best director at the Hong Kong Film Awards six times, more than any filmmaker in the ceremony’s history, and three times at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards. Twice — with Summer Snow in 1995 and A Simple Life in 2011 — her work swept best film, director, actor and actress at the Hong Kong awards. In 2020, she became the first female director to receive Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, sharing that year’s honor with Tilda Swinton. She was previously honored in Busan in 2914 as the Asian Filmmaker of the Year.

Established in 2024, the Camellia Award takes its name from a flower that is both Busan’s civic emblem and, famously, Gabrielle Chanel’s favorite. Korean production designer Ryu Seong-hie (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) was its inaugural recipient, followed last year by Taiwanese actress and filmmaker Sylvia Chang.

“I am so happy to return to Busan,” Hui added, “and meet an audience that is among the most savvy and cinematically literate in the world.”

Hui will be honored alongside Michelle Yeoh, this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year, at a ceremony hosted by Pachinko star Kim Minha. The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs Oct. 6-15.

NBC did some method casting on its comedy pilot Newlyweds earlier this year, with Tèa Leoni and Tim Daly, who had tied the knot just months prior, tapped as the titular leads in the multi-camera comedy. It marked an on-screen reunion of the duo who also played a husband and wife on the 2014 CBS drama series Madam Secretary.

The joint casting was not an accident.

“We were kind of sniffing around to play together again,” Leoni said at an NBCUniversal event Monday ahead of Newlyweds’ series debut this fall. “We had a lot of fun on Madam Secretary. The world got darker, and we wanted to get lighter. We thought we’ve done this particular medium, and loved it, and we wanted to spend our days together.” 


Added Daly, “Listen, we spent six years pretending to be married on TV, and I would get to do it again, but we actually are married. It’s a miracle, it’s really fun, it’s cool, and we still like each other.”


Said Leoni, “It took 12 years, but we got there.”

Newlyweds tells the story of a free‑spirited woman (Leoni) and a buttoned‑up professor (Daly) who marry impetuously after a whirlwind courtship.

“We’ve been told that we have chemistry, we were told that on Madam Secretary, and, hopefully, we exported that into this show,” Daly said.

Added Leoni, “We haven’t lost it.”

While they have proven to have an on-screen couple chemistry, being one in real life has its advantages too.

“One, we don’t need an intimacy coordinator because we are licensed to do whatever we want,” Daly said.

Additionally, “We get to start ahead of the game,” Leoni said, giving an example with an exchange between their characters on their first date in the Newlyweds pilot.

“I was looking at James, aka Tim, and I can read him, I know where he’s going,” Leoni said. “We just found this moment because ‑‑ maybe that happened somewhere else, but it happens in our life all the time, and it’s fun. It’s really fun to act with someone that you know so well because we are a little ahead with each other. It’s great, we like it.”


Newlyweds is created and executive produced by Gail Lerner and Jaimie Lee Curtis, with the Oscar winner also recurring on the show.

Curtis was asked about being a boss on the show.

“I like to refer to myself as the ‘HBIC,’ head bitch in charge,” she said. “I’m 68 years old, I have wanted to be a boss my whole life. If you ask my children, my husband, they would tell you I’ve been a boss my whole life, but I’ve been waiting my whole life, literally, to be able to manifest ideas and bring what I love about what I do into the workplace I do it in. I’ve been doing it not as a boss for a long, long time, and now I’m a boss, and I love it.”

Curtis’ title choice was clearly by design.

When asked what she brings of herself to her role as James’ (Daly) ex-wife, she did not mince words. “I’m really a bitch,” she quipped.