The company that owns iPic has filed for bankruptcy.
Photo courtesy of Wade Park
The financially troubled iPic Entertainment dining-and-movie theater chain, which operates one location in Austin and another in Houston, filed for bankruptcy protection Monday, August 5, and is seeking a potential buyer or a court-supervised restructuring. In the meantime, the chain’s 16 theaters remain open.
“Our brand is thriving and leads the industry in popularity, but our balance sheet needs to course correct,” founder and CEO Hamid Hashemi says in a release issued Monday by Boca Raton, Florida-based iPic. “Our theaters will remain open during this transition, our employees are being paid, as are our vendors and suppliers.”
The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, which seeks to reorganize the company’s finances, lists nearly $291 million in debt.
The iPic chain, founded in 2010, operates 16 upscale theaters throughout the U.S., including one in Austin at 3225 Amy Donovan Plaza in the Domain development and one at 4444 Westheimer Rd. in Houston's River Oaks District.
The company says it plans to open more iPic theaters in Texas, but the prospective locations of those new theaters couldn’t be determined. Representatives of iPic couldn’t be reached for comment.
The iPic bankruptcy filing comes on the heels of big news about another dine-in movie theater chain.
Late last month, Austin-based chain Moviehouse & Eatery was purchased by Dallas-based Cinépolis USA, part of a conglomerate that operates movie theaters in 17 countries. Moviehouse & Eatery has five theaters in Texas — two in Austin and three in Dallas-Fort Worth — with another theater set to open in The Woodlands in November.
Robert Pattinson is among a select group of actors with multiple high-profile roles in 2026, having already starred in The Drama and The Odyssey, with Dune: Part Three yet to come. But the one that may earn him an Oscar nomination - if not win - is Primetime, in which he stars as Chris Hansen, the former host of the Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator.
The film, directed by Lance Oppenheim and written by Ajon Singh, plops viewers right in the middle of the short-lived run (2004-2007) of the program, which aimed to expose men for trying to have sex with teenagers. Hansen is obsessed with making the show successful, which means enticing as many child predators as they can and recruiting young-looking adult actors to serve as decoys for sting operations.
Helping him in his pursuit is producer Andie Bender (Merrit Wever), who has her own ambitions; recruiter Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), who perhaps enjoys trapping predators a bit too much; and decoys Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) and Del (Phoebe Bridgers), who have to muster all the improv skills they can when the men show up. As the story proceeds, each participant weighs their own level of comfort with the controversial practices of the show as a whole.
Depending on the audience, the film can play as a serious drama, a comedy, a horror, or a combination of all three. It seems like Oppenheim wants to confront the audience with the uncomfortable feeling of not having anyone for whom to root. You certainly can’t feel bad for the predators, who actively engage with someone they believe to be a child. But the process of getting men on the show, as well as the treatment of the decoys, is itself unsavory and difficult to defend.
At the center is a protagonist whose persona is interesting as a character, but less appealing as an actual person. As Hansen pushes everyone around him to do all they can for the sake of the show, his hubris puts him right in line with your standard antihero. But the idea of a man obsessed with his job who all but ignores his family and cheats on his wife is ultimately not that compelling and plays like the cliché it is.
If the film was supposed to be an exposé on what Hansen and the show as a whole got wrong in the pursuit of justice, it fails to bring about any strong feelings on either side. The one area where it does succeed is in its depictions of the two decoys, and Oppenheim might have been better served by showcasing them more. The film does shift toward being more of a story about Dan than Hansen, but not enough to make a big impact.
Oppenheim has seemingly devised the film as an acting showcase, and in that regard it works well. Pattinson is all-in with his performance, going to great lengths to demonstrate Hansen’s passion for the show. He has many fantastic line readings, including a one-word utterance late in the film that brings the house down. Wever and Gisondo are just as good, and Bridgers — making her acting debut — steals several of the scenes she’s in.
The impact To Catch a Predator had on society despite the small number of episodes (20) it had is something worth exploring, as the documentary Predators did in 2025. But Primetime doesn’t get to the heart of the matter in a way that makes for necessary viewing, leaving it as a testament to the skills of its actors and not much else.
