From Assault Allegations to Fights Over Unpaid Bills: Bruin Theatre Chief Rui Pereira’s Scandals Go Back Years

Sep 04, 2026 - 01:11

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From Assault Allegations to Fights Over Unpaid Bills: Bruin Theatre Chief Rui Pereira’s Scandals Go Back Years

Rui Pereira announced himself to Los Angeles this summer with a takeover of Westwood’s historic Bruin Theatre that has proven as controversial as it is ambitious.

The Canadian exhibitor has operated Toronto’s single-screen Kingsway Theatre since 2009. Last week, two volunteers left his new restoration effort in Los Angeles amid allegations of racism and antisemitism, after social media users connected posts from the Kingsway account to Pereira’s work at the Bruin.

“There are no controversies and any attempt to generate them is dishonest and disingenuous,” Pereira told IndieWire when asked about the allegations and departures on August 26.

Inside the Bruin Theatre on August 17, 2026

The Bruin Theatre and an outside rental for Universal's "Fast and Furious" event on August 17, 2026

Two days later, when The Hollywood Reporter asked Pereira to comment on specific posts about Jewish people made by the Kingsway account, he acknowledged that they were “offensive” and said he “must take responsibility.” Pereira continued to deny other allegations against him, including accusations of racism and racial discrimination, as well as claims involving his business practices in Toronto.

That tension is one of many IndieWire encountered while examining Pereira’s complicated history. In a Sept. 2 email to IndieWire, Pereira said the previous claims we reported were “false, misleading and written with no attributions or basis in any legal proceedings or documented events.”

IndieWire interviewed more than 25 sources in the U.S. and Canada who have encountered Pereira since 2009, granting anonymity only to those who explicitly cited concerns about retaliation. Accounts from unnamed sources were included only when IndieWire could independently corroborate them through additional documentation.

We also reviewed emails, social media messages, Ontario and L.A. court records, internet archives, customer reviews, Comscore box-office data, and years of advertised Kingsway screenings verified by an independent film researcher. Pereira maintains that there are “no outstanding legal matters or actions against the Kingsway Theatre” and says many of his accusers have no connection to him or the business. He was invited to provide IndieWire evidence to support these claims but declined.

The following history traces allegations of assault, unpaid debts, discrimination, harassment, and unauthorized film exhibition from 2009 to the present. Pereira has offered explanations throughout.

2009: Kingsway Partnership Falls Apart

Rui Pereira’s turbulent history as a Toronto theater operator began almost as soon as he took over the Kingsway Theatre in 2009, with Rick Ross, president of the Ontario technology company SwitchWorks, involved as an investor.

Ross told IndieWire he put roughly $200,000 into renovating the theater with Pereira. But within months, their relationship had collapsed.

On June 26, 2009, Ross says he arrived at the theater with a colleague intending to retrieve tools. He provided IndieWire with a 28-minute audio recording and accompanying emails that appear to document the confrontation that followed.

The recording captures both men accusing the other of assault and calling police during a confrontation outside the Kingsway. Ross at times sounds antagonistic and refuses repeated demands to leave, asserting partial ownership of the business. Pereira responds with escalating personal insults.

“I don’t give a shit about your documents. You are nothing,” the voice attributed to Pereira says.

A photo of the Kingsway Theatre in September 2026.

Thirteen days later, on July 9, 2009, Ross says he returned during an afternoon screening and alleges Pereira attacked him in front of the audience.

“He pursued and struck me without provocation,” Ross said. He alleges the fight continued into a second-floor office, where Pereira kicked him down the stairs, before the brawl spilled onto the street.

Ross says a CT scan revealed a cracked eye socket, and a photo he says was taken at the hospital shows substantial bruising and swelling around his left eye. Police were involved, according to an eyewitness who worked near the Kingsway in 2009, but IndieWire found no public record of the alleged fight.

Two additional sources told IndieWire they spoke with Ross about the incident at the time and personally saw his injuries. Each offered details consistent with Ross’ account.

Ross says he and Pereira later resolved a civil action out of court. He also says the dispute resulted in a peace bond under Section 810 of Canada’s Criminal Code. A peace bond is a preventive order and does not establish that a criminal offense occurred. Pereira did not specifically respond to these allegations.

2012: Humber Cinema Ends in a Lockout

In 2011, Pereira attempted to restore a second Toronto theater. Less than a year after reopening the Humber Cinema, he was locked out amid allegations of unpaid rent and bills, beginning a highly publicized dispute with landlord Claude Bitton that developed into a prolonged legal battle.

On July 17, 2012, BlogTO reported that Bitton (who died in 2018) had accused Pereira of owing him several thousand dollars. Pereira disputed that account, maintaining that seats, projectors, and other equipment inside the theater belonged to his company and accusing Bitton of “hijacking” the business.

Bitton continued operating the Humber, while competing Facebook pages reportedly offered contradictory accounts of who controlled the theater and who owned what.

The public fallout at the Humber also marked a break between Pereira and film journalist Sean Patrick Kelly. Kelly had praised the theater’s 2011 reopening and Pereira’s commitment to projecting 35mm film, and remembers their early exchanges as cordial. But as Kelly’s coverage of Pereira and his theaters grew more critical amid the Humber fallout, he says Pereira’s attitude changed.

“Rui Pereira is a notorious bully in the Toronto film community who tends to hold grudges against those who cross him,” Kelly told IndieWire in a recent email. Kelly says he has since moved on and feels “indifferent” toward Pereira, but that the Kingsway operator’s behavior “affected me greatly.”

Court records reviewed by IndieWire show Pereira sued Bitton and others in Ontario Superior Court in 2013 and was later named as a defendant in a counterclaim. Pereira previously told IndieWire, “All matters at the Humber were resolved to mutual satisfaction with Claude Bitton and subsequently with his estate and subject to a nondisclosure.” He added, “The Humber closed in 2019 and was demolished in 2022 for a condominium development.”

2017: A Backpack Dispute Becomes a Discrimination Debate

In March 2017, actress Oluniké Adeliyi accused the Kingsway Theatre of racial discrimination after a dispute over its backpack policy led Pereira to call police. Adeliyi, who is Black, had gone to see Jeff Nichols’ “Loving” but declined to surrender her backpack to Pereira, who said the theater’s policy prohibited bags. The Kingsway ultimately refused to sell her a ticket.

Describing the experience as “dehumanizing,” Adeliyi specifically objected to Pereira identifying her to a police dispatcher as a Black woman who was allegedly threatening the theater.

“I take offence to being labelled dangerous,” she told the Toronto Star at the time.

Though Adeliyi was widely identified in coverage as an actress, she was also a Kingsway customer — and her experience reflects a recurring complaint in the Toronto theater’s unusually long paper trail of operational disputes. Over more than 10 years, customers have described conflicts ranging from transactional disagreements to physical pushing and verbal abuse they attribute to management.

Pereira denied that race played any role in the 2017 conflict. He called Adeliyi’s account a “false narrative,” said the backpack rule applied to everyone, and maintained that he identified her race only after the police dispatcher requested a physical description.

After the news died down, the Kingsway account nevertheless continued resurfacing the controversy years later. In a 2024 post, the Kingsway asked Adeliyi, “How is the ‘acting’ going?” (Adeliyi did not answer IndieWire’s request for comment.)

IndieWire has documented and reviewed screenshots of other inflammatory remarks about race attributed to the Kingsway account. One post we did not previously report comes from January 2025, when Magic Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Joe Biden. The Kingsway account is accused of telling the L.A. basketball legend, “Nice to see you got your plantation participation award.”

2019–Present: Unlicensed Screening Allegations

IndieWire identified 55 advertised Kingsway screenings of 17 films that three separate rights holders say they did not authorize. Pereira previously denied any such problem.

“There are no issues with film licensing or any disputes,” he said, citing relationships with major studios and independent distributors that did not respond to IndieWire’s requests for comment.

The earliest licensing dispute IndieWire documented began on August 16, 2019, when American Genre Film Archive theatrical sales director Bret Berg contacted the Kingsway about an advertised screening of “Nosferatu in Venice.” Berg told Pereira over Facebook Messenger that AGFA controlled the film’s Canadian theatrical rights and offered chain-of-title documentation.

The Kingsway account argued that the film was effectively “abandoned” in Canada because it did not appear in an Ontario Film Authority database. But the OFA database tracked films submitted for an Ontario age rating, not who owned or controlled the right to screen them. The agency also shut down two months later.

Berg says that was his only interaction with the Kingsway and that AGFA did not authorize any screenings there. IndieWire found 20 advertised screenings across 10 AGFA-controlled films between 2019 and 2026.

“It would have cost us more money to get a lawyer in Canada to figure out if what he was saying was true than we would ever make,” Berg said, adding that no other Canadian theater had challenged AGFA’s rights on the same basis the Kingsway account used.

Two additional independent rights holders told IndieWire they did not authorize screenings identified in our review. One said it had not licensed four films connected to 27 advertised Kingsway screenings since 2022. The other identified three films associated with eight advertised Kingsway screenings.

The latter company also provided proof of a cease-and-desist sent to the Kingsway, asserting that it held North American rights to one of the films and directing the Toronto theater not to proceed with an announced showing. The source told IndieWire they believe the theater ignored that notice.

These findings do not establish that the Kingsway failed to license all, or even most, of its programming. IndieWire’s assessment began with a limited sample of 80 films provided by a Toronto moviegoer, included two additional titles identified by rights holders during the reporting process, and did not encompass the full catalogs of any of the three companies that participated in our review.

Pereira did not respond specifically to IndieWire’s findings, but reiterated that there “are no outstanding legal matters or actions against the Kingsway.”

The Toronto theater also shows first-run titles. A former executive who worked at two major studios and oversaw Canadian distribution involving the venue told IndieWire that the Kingsway always licensed those companies’ films, but also described Pereira as a “terrible customer.”

For another independent distributor, the Kingsway’s past extends to the Bruin’s future: “I will absolutely never do business with them,” they said. “I’ll never book a film there if he’s involved.”

2023: Pereira Clashes with a Jewish Critic

Corey Atad says Pereira called and yelled at him for roughly half an hour in November 2023 after the freelance journalist excluded the Kingsway from a Toronto Star piece about the city’s best repertory cinemas. Atad says he had partly avoided covering the Kingsway because of its operator’s reputation for public confrontations with reporters.

Still, Atad kept going to the theater because he valued its programming.

“Despite the theater being in terrible shape and [Pereira] charging too much and all these different things and him being how he is, I was going to those screenings because they were really cool screenings,” Atad said. “In a funny way, I was protecting him there.”

That calculation changed as the Kingsway account began questioning the legitimacy of Jews it associated with Zionism. Three days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, the account posted, “These are not Jews — they are brainwashed cultists of zionism.”

Atad, who is Jewish, publicly accused Pereira of antisemitism by June 2024. He characterized the Kingsway rhetoric as repeatedly distinguishing between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate Jews based on their perceived relationship to Zionism: an antisemitic pattern, he said, rather than reasonable criticism of the Israeli government.

Pereira “went real scorched-earth on me,” Atad said. “I don’t even see these posts unless somebody sends them to me. But every now and then, I’ll see that he’s still posting about me.”

Atad no longer visits the Kingsway, whose social media previously posted his photo and labeled him “banned.” Asked by IndieWire why he thinks the theater account continues to mention him two years later, Atad said: “I think a lot of it is because I’m Jewish and I called him an anti-Semite.”

In 2025, the Kingsway account told one target to “Go back to Poland” and called a swastika painted on a Jewish family’s home “the proper symbol for zionazis.” Asked about those specific statements by The Hollywood Reporter last week, Pereira acknowledged they were “offensive” and said he “must take responsibility.” He also suggested the scrutiny “may be blowback” from the Kingsway’s screenings of the Palestinian films “No Other Land” and “Palestine 36.”

IndieWire identified Kingsway posts questioning the legitimacy of Jews beginning in October 2023, before either Palestinian film premiered. Atad’s criticism also predates those screenings; in March 2025, Atad wrote a GQ article urging readers to see “No Other Land” and explaining how they could watch it. Other Toronto exhibitors of the same films told IndieWire they received some strongly worded emails in response but did not describe a prolonged hate campaign against them. One source replied, “Did anyone call me antisemitic? No.”

2026: Who Owns the Kingsway’s Film Prints?

Comscore data reviewed by IndieWire show the theater reported approximately $4.22 million in total box office between August 2009 and August 2026. That’s an average of roughly $247,000 per year.

That figure reflects theatrical grosses reported to Comscore, not the theater’s total revenue, and cannot account for concessions, private rentals, or other possible sources of income. Without access to the Kingsway’s expenses or financial records, IndieWire could not independently assess its profitability.

A former executive, who previously worked at two major studios overseeing Canadian distribution (also mentioned above), called the data “dreadful” before adding, “Frankly, I’m surprised it’s even that high.”

A second distribution source, who worked for a major theater chain at the executive level, called the figure “abysmal” and questioned how the Kingsway had remained in operation for so long.

The theater’s physical film collection is now the subject of another legal dispute.

Pereira is involved in an ongoing conflict with Canadian film archivist and musician Peter Aldanmaz over dozens of 35mm prints and two projectors. Pereira has seemingly publicized the matter himself through legal documents posted to the Kingsway’s social media accounts, with Aldanmaz disputing his claims.

In June 2026, the Kingsway account posted a demand letter from Pereira’s attorneys alleging that Aldanmaz had refused to return more than 60 film prints and two projectors belonging to the theater and was using them for profit. Pereira told IndieWire that Aldanmaz had borrowed the materials for free scanning but “never returned” them, and that he was preparing to file a Statement of Claim in Ontario Superior Court.

A March 2026 summons, also posted to the Kingsway account, shows Aldanmaz sought a peace bond after alleging that Pereira threatened him and that he feared Pereira would cause him personal injury or damage his property.

“The only thing I can confirm at this time is that I am currently pursuing a peace bond involving Mr. Pereira,” Aldanmaz told IndieWire in an email. “As this is an ongoing legal matter, I am not able to comment on the circumstances, allegations, evidence, or any other details related to the proceeding. This has been a difficult time for me and my family, and I sincerely hope the matter can be resolved through the appropriate legal process.”

As with the peace-bond proceeding that Rick Ross says took place in 2009, the filing does not establish that the allegations are true or that Pereira committed a criminal offense. The peace-bond matter with Aldanmaz remained active as of Aug. 20, when Ontario records listed an appearance to set a trial date.

What Happens to the Bruin Now?

As allegations surrounding Pereira spread through Los Angeles film circles, one question repeatedly surfaced on social media: How had someone with such an extensive and readily searchable history of public disputes in Toronto come to be entrusted with one of the city’s most beloved movie theaters?

That scrutiny carries particular weight in Westwood, where Pereira’s Bruin sits directly across the street from Directors Village, the newly revived theater planned for a $25 million restoration beginning in October. The movie palace will eventually be operated and programmed by the nonprofit American Cinematheque, which already runs several other historic cinemas around town. Some of the summer’s biggest L.A. film events have recently taken place at Directors Village, and the Bruin account has routinely posted about activity across the street.

In a statement to IndieWire, the Bruin’s ownership said, “The owners of the Bruin Theater condemn, without reservation, all comments of hate.” The owners did not answer IndieWire’s questions about Pereira or explain their decision to lease him the building.

IndieWire was unable to reach the Kingsway’s landlords in Toronto. Local theater activist Ben Steinberg, who previously said he received no warnings about Pereira and “did not have time to investigate” before joining the Bruin effort, declined to speak further.

Pereira now maintains that Steinberg and fellow volunteer Edwin Gomez had “no involvement whatsoever” in the Bruin project, despite their previous public association with the restoration. He said he is the only person authorized to speak for the project and is preparing a response to IndieWire’s reporting for the company’s editors, legal department, the Bruin’s owners, and their attorneys. He also directed IndieWire and its representatives not to return to the theater or approach its staff.

The turmoil surrounding Pereira and the Bruin raises real concerns about how discerning the L.A. movie community needs to be when trusting strangers with important institutions that need saving.

Pereira maintains that the allegations surrounding his professional history in Toronto are dishonest attempts to undermine both him and his Bruin restoration. His critics see something different: a pattern of toxic disputes and failed business partnerships repeatedly created or escalated by Pereira himself.

After nearly two decades of documented conflicts with investors, landlords, patrons, journalists and film distributors, both explanations present a potential problem for the Bruin. And either way, the conflict will be showing in Westwood theaters this fall.