Summer On Broxton: Why Westwood Village Is Briefly Acting Like Itself Again

For a stretch of about six weeks this summer, the walk from Wilshire up to Weyburn is more interesting than the drive to Century City or Third Street Promenade. That has not been true in a long time. The Regency Village Theatre is running Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in 70mm before it goes dark for a year. Broxton Avenue is opening a new restaurant roughly every other month. The Hammer's summer schedule includes the World Cup Final on a big screen in the courtyard. If you live in Little Holmby, Comstock Hills, Westwood proper, or on the Century City side of the 405, the neighborhood has quietly re-earned the case for staying local on a Friday night.

The thesis of this post is simple and worth stating up front: the Village is in an inflection window that will not repeat. The theater closes this fall. The Broxton corridor is filling faster than it has in a decade. The two things are converging in the same summer, and residents are the ones best positioned to notice.

The Village Theatre run has a hard end date

The historic movie palace on Broxton reopened briefly this summer for a specific reason. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is screening at the Westwood Village Theater for three weeks, from July 16 to August 6, 2026, with multiple showings every day in 70mm. Under a special arrangement between Universal and the Village Directors Circle, the collective of filmmakers led by Jason Reitman that bought the movie palace in 2024, American Cinematheque is programming and operating the theater.

The engagement is not a soft relaunch. It is a farewell before construction. The screenings are part of a fundraising effort to support a 12-month, $25 million renovation of the Village beginning in the fall, to be completed next year. The Village Directors Circle and Cinematheque want the remodeled Village Theatre to be a venue for special screenings with in-person conversations, awards season events, new theatrical releases, retrospectives, and Cinematheque's year-round programming, and they want to continue the venue's legacy of hosting movie premieres.

For residents, the practical read is this: you have until early August to see a first-run picture inside one of the last true single-screen movie palaces in Los Angeles, projected the way it was meant to be seen, and then the doors close for roughly a year. The Cinematheque's other house, the Aero on Montana in Santa Monica, will continue programming during the closure.

What's opened on Broxton, and what's queued behind it

The dining wave on Broxton is real and datable. It is easier to see as a table than as a paragraph.

A few of these deserve a sentence more than the grid gives them.

The Raising Cane's opening drew a genuine crowd. The first customer arrived around 8 p.m. Sunday, about 14 hours before the doors opened at 10 a.m., and the restaurant opened at 1008 Broxton Ave., at the corner of Broxton and Weyburn avenues, in a renovated historic building with a patio, garage-style doors, and custom décor inspired by the surrounding neighborhood. The new Westwood location is open daily from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.

NADC Burger has a more interesting pedigree than its address suggests. The new burger joint slipped into the old Prince of Venice spot at 1091 Broxton in Westwood Village, and it is the brainchild of pro skateboarder Neen Williams and Michelin-starred chef Phillip Frankland Lee, with a simple menu of 100% Wagyu burgers and beef tallow fries.

Sana'a Cafe is the most unusual of the incoming crop. The new location will be at 939 Broxton Ave., formerly occupied by BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, which closed in July 2024, and Sana'a Cafe has eight locations along the California coast and one in Tacoma. The menu includes Yemeni specialties like Sana'ani, a coffee flavored with cardamom, and qishr, a drink made from coffee bean husks, cinnamon, and ginger, alongside pastries like rose milk cake and honeycomb.

Bread Head is worth waiting for on a Saturday morning. Sandwich shop Bread Head is opening a new location at 1136 Westwood Blvd in Westwood Village, from Alex Williams and Jordan Snyder, two chefs with Trois Mec pedigrees who specialize in sandwiches on proprietary focaccia.

None of this is a coincidence. The Westwood location fits into a broader development pattern the Westwood Village Improvement Association has described as the neighborhood's most significant commercial expansion in a decade.

Broxton Plaza is the thing that ties it together

The reason the openings feel like a neighborhood and not a list of leases is the plaza. It has surpassed the Sunset Triangle Plaza in Silver Lake as the largest plaza of its kind in the city. The Westwood Village Improvement Association plans to spend upwards of $100,000 a year on upkeep and staffing, including a dedicated Plaza ambassador who greets visitors and sets up tables and chairs outdoors to expand the al fresco dining areas for restaurants, and it provides much-needed open space in the Village. The plaza already draws regulars who come for First Thursday nights featuring UCLA artists and musicians.

If you have not walked Broxton since the barricades went up, the practical difference is that the block between Weyburn and Kinross now functions the way it looks in old photographs. That is the frame everything else fits into.

The Hammer's summer is the quiet counterweight

Two blocks south on Wilshire, the museum is running one of its better summers in recent memory, and admission is still free.

The headline exhibition is dense and sensory. Twenty-two artists from North, Central, and South America have employed mediums like soil, stones, avocado, cacao, achiote, cochineal, and clay, and from the moment you walk in you can smell the soil, feel a vibrating wall, and listen to sonic interventions throughout the show, ending in a meditative black-walled room with ocean sounds and sand covering the floor. The show, Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials, runs through August 23. Arthur Jafa's The White Album runs alongside it through August 30.

The summer programming outside the galleries is arguably the bigger draw for residents. The Hammer is hosting World Cup watch parties on big screens in an indoor-outdoor setting, with screenings for 16 men's matches. The Final between Argentina and Spain will play at the museum in the same format. The KCRW Summer Nights series continues its Thursday-evening run in the courtyard. Lulu, the Hammer's restaurant from David Tanis and Alice Waters, remains open for lunch and dinner.

Stack that against a normal Thursday in July and the calculation for a Little Holmby or Comstock Hills resident tilts obvious: park once, wander the exhibits, eat at Lulu, walk up Westwood Boulevard, and end at the plaza.

A short calendar for the next six weeks

• Now through August 6: The Odyssey in 70mm at the Regency Village Theatre, three times a day.
• Through August 23: Several Eternities in a Day at the Hammer.
• Through August 30: Arthur Jafa's The White Album at the Hammer.
• World Cup Final: Argentina vs. Spain, watch party in the Hammer courtyard.
• Every Thursday: KCRW Summer Nights at the Hammer, free.
• First Thursdays: UCLA artists and musicians at Broxton Plaza.

Why any of this matters if you already live here

Two long-standing complaints about the Village were that the theater sat closed and that Broxton felt like a corridor you passed through rather than one you stopped in. Both are, briefly and simultaneously, no longer true. The theater is running a Nolan picture in the format he shot it in. The plaza has furniture and programming. The block that lost BJ's, Habibi, Prince of Venice, and Pieology in quick succession has, in the last twelve months, gained NADC, Raising Cane's, Van Leeuwen, and a pipeline of names behind them.

The window closes on its own schedule. The theater goes dark in the fall for a year. Some of the incoming openings will land, and a few will not. The neighborhood you have on a Friday night in late July 2026 is not the neighborhood you will have on a Friday night in late July 2027. It is worth walking it while it looks the way it looks now.

If you own a home in Westwood, Little Holmby, Comstock Hills, or on the Century City side of the corridor and would like a thoughtful read on what any of this means for your property, Shannon Flaherty Minor is available for a private conversation and a complimentary home valuation.