A brewery belongs in a movie theater
How Flix Brewhouse built a resilient dine-in cinema by pairing craft beer with disciplined operations, smart real estate strategy and a post-pandemic reset.
There are easier ways to sell beer than brewing it yourself. There are easier ways to run a theater than feeding people in the dark. Flix Brewhouse chose the harder path on purpose, then built a playbook around two things most dine-in cinemas struggle to do consistently: quality and discipline.
We sat down with Allan Reagan, founder of Flix Brewhouse, to talk through the company’s origin story, the realities of operating in a Hollywood-dependent industry, and the decisions that helped Flix stay on stable ground as moviegoing reset after the pandemic.
The quality part starts with the belief that the beer is not an afterthought. It is “part of the main deal,” not a gimmick. That same standard applies to food, with an operating focus on consistent execution, not just novelty.
The discipline part is rooted in a blunt reality about the industry Flix lives in: “moviegoing [has] not returned and will never return to the levels of pre-pandemic.”
Built for the peaks and valleys
Running a dine-in cinema is not like running a restaurant with steady habits or a retail concept with predictable demand. The biggest operational challenge is volatility, and it is constant.
“The hardest part of dine-in cinema is operating a business that has severe peaks and valleys because you’re still driven by the content on the screen.” The swings are not seasonal. They are week-to-week: “your volume can double or drop in half … week over week.”
And yes, it is “very, very Hollywood dependent,” with the whole spectrum of sleeper hits, blockbusters, disappointments, and “outright turds.”
That single dynamic drives decisions across scheduling, staffing, programming, and where the concept can actually win long-term.
The Triple-A map: Where to expand, and why
Expansion isn’t about chasing the biggest markets. It’s about markets where a premium dine-in cinema can become a repeat destination without fighting a saturated competitive set. Flix targets mid-sized cities and high-performing suburbs with enough discretionary spend to support the experience, but less noise than major urban cores.
“We like AAA locations,” a shorthand for the “right-sized” markets that often resemble Triple-A minor league baseball cities and strong suburbs: big enough to support consistent entertainment demand, smaller and less crowded than the biggest metros. Those markets also tend to support repeat visits and strong word-of-mouth without the same density of competing premium entertainment options.
Even when entering major metros, the strategy stays consistent. “If we’re gonna go into those large markets, we’re not going into the urban core, we’re going into the burbs,” with examples like Mansfield and Frisco in the Dallas area, and Katy outside Houston.
Real estate mistakes don’t heal
In restaurants, you can sometimes recover from a rough opening through better operations. In theaters, the lease can make sure you never get the chance.
The view is simple: you can fix seats, service, even a refresh. But “if you overpaid in the first place … then you’ll never get there.”
That is why real estate discipline is non-negotiable. The two guardrails are purchase price and lease economics, because if either one is wrong, the model may never have room to breathe. In a business defined by peaks and valleys, the margin for error is thin, and “there’s no recovery” from the wrong deal structure.
The post-pandemic reset Flix planned for, early
Theaters did not come out of the pandemic into the old world. Flix’s edge is that it never assumed the old world was coming back.
During the pandemic, Reagan said he was on CNBC predicting the business would be down “as much as 25%,” and added, “I was dead nuts on.”
While many operators deferred rent under pre-pandemic assumptions, Flix negotiated for a future that matched the new baseline. “During the pandemic [we] restructured all our leases,” then described a structure where rent is “largely based on a percentage of sales,” and over time “a certain amount of the percentage rent gets capitalized into fixed rent.”
Technology, automation, and the “platinum rule”
Flix is not anti-technology. It is anti-forcing people into one rigid experience.
Many businesses try to train customers, “you must do it our way. If you want to give us money … you’ve got to follow our instructions.” The pushback is to build flexibility with guardrails, and to “try to understand your public.”
That philosophy extends to employees, vendors, investors, and guests: “Be people oriented and meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.”
He gave it a name: the shift from the golden rule to the platinum rule. “The platinum rule is to treat others as they would like to be treated.”
Even automation fits inside that frame. Robots can move trays and repeat a process perfectly, which matters when consistency is the whole game. “The one nice thing about computers and robots is they do tend to repeat themselves,” down to the details of execution.
When Flix outgrew a local CPA
Growth eventually turned a local finance setup into a bottleneck. “It became very clear that we were outgrowing our local CPA firm,” describing “increasing dissatisfaction” and a need for a broader “basket of services in tax” as the organization scaled.
Baker Tilly came into the fold as Flix expanded and the needs became more complex than a local CPA could support. The goal was a partner with strong technical depth and the ability to pull in the right specialists when needed, without losing responsiveness or a hands-on working style.
Asked what Flix would say if recommending Baker Tilly to another growing company, Reagan emphasized four things: responsiveness, strong listening, access to the right specialists when needs change, and the ability to work through disagreements professionally.
Put into a single sentence: Baker Tilly is responsive, listens closely, brings the right resources as our needs evolve, and handles disagreement with professionalism.
In a business defined by volatility, Flix’s approach is straightforward: control what you can control. That means beer and food quality, disciplined real estate decisions, and a cost structure built for the post-pandemic reality. It also means running the business by the platinum rule: meet people where they are, and treat them the way they want to be treated.
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