Presidio Heights’ 119-year-old Vogue Theater has just had its marquee neon sign fully restored to its former glory, and will have a public lighting ceremony next Wednesday, December 3, followed by a free screening of the 1936 gem San Francisco.

San Francisco is definitely an outlier on the movie theater scene right now, as our single-screen movie houses may be enjoying something of a renaissance instead of going totally extinct like they are in pretty much every other town. The Mission District's Roxie Theater just managed to buy its building outright to guarantee its survival (okay it also has a smaller, adjacent, second theater called Little Roxie), the Upper Fillmore’s Clay theater is going to be reopened after a physical restoration, and the granddaddy of them all, the single-screen Castro Theatre will be showing movies again in Spring 2026 (though obviously, that place has been transformed into something other than just a movie theater).

And there’s legislation winding through SF City Hall  to let those movie theaters sell alcohol more easily, so that may put a little wind at those classic movie theaters’ backs.

Now yet another single-screen movie theater has more big news. The Chronicle reports that Presidio Heights’ Vogue Theater has had its neon sign fully restored, and there will be a public lighting ceremony next Wednesday, December 3 at 7 pm, with Mayor Daniel Lurie on hand.

That ceremony will be followed by a free screening of the 1936 Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy musical epic San Francisco, which features the song “San Francisco,” which is the song that the organist at the Castro Theatre used to always play right before the movie started.

“CinemaSFBay, the non-profit organization that operates the Vogue, is proud to bring the Vogue into a new era of beauty,” the theater’s management said in a Facebook post this morning. “Jim Rizzo and crew at Neon Works worked for 5 months to complete the restoration, replacing all transformers, many neon tubes, and reusing some of the original neon tubes, maintaining the tone and feel of the original color scheme.”

CinemaSF is the same local theater preservation nonprofit that has restored the Richmond District’s 4 Star Theater and Balboa Theater as well as the Park Theater in Lafayette.

If you want to support this single-screen movie house revival in SF, realize the Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento Street) also has a slew of kitschy holiday screenings coming up in December, including National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Irving Berlin's White Christmas, The Hebrew Hammer, Christmas Evil, and The Polar Express. Or if you’re more of a first-run movie person, the Vogue and Balboa theaters (3630 Balboa Street) both have Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery playing this Tuesday through Sunday, though not on Thanksgiving Day.

And the Vogue is also reviving their New Year’s Eve “A Very Purple New Year’s Eve” movie party with the Prince films Purple Rain and Sign O the Times on December 31.

Related: Vintage Ad Shows 40 Movie Theaters That Once Dotted San Francisco [SFist]

Image: Jennifer O via Yelp