Watch Out Angelika! Sundance Is On The March

New York's defining indie movie theater -- the Angelika - probably missed the boat on extending its franchise around the country sometime back in...oh, I don't know, the early '90s. (God knows I used to buy the Sunday New York Times growing up in South Florida -- back when independent films took eight months or a year or never to get to Ft. Lauderdale and just read the names of the movies playing at the Angelika and dream of being able to go there.)

Now I think the very idea of an indie movie chain is outdated, thanks to 20 screen pultiplexes that can show Superman Returns on eight screens and still have plenty of room left over for Soderbergh's Bubble or The Libertine or whatever. But that isn't stopping Robert Redford. He's building a Sundance multiplex in Madison, Wisconsin from the ground up and now he's just bought San Francisco's venerable Kabuki 8 from AMC. The Madison is scheduled to open in November. The Sundance Kabuki will change hands in the summer or early fall.