North Texas dog-friendly theater serves unlimited wine and movies

K9 Cinemas in Plano is unlike any theater you’ve been to.

For starters, the concession stand serves bottomless free wine on Friday and Saturday nights. More important, however, are the pooches: many good boys and girls, all brought by owners to the world’s first and only dog-friendly indoor theater.

Owner Eric Lankford, 29, opened K9 Cinemas as a passion project. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Lankford left an unsatisfying job in the pharmaceutical industry in 2018 and moved to Texas looking to do something that made him happy and let him be closer to his best friend: an Australian Eskimo named Bear.

“I love movies, and Bear gets terrible separation anxiety,” Lankford said. “I wanted to do something where people could go out and watch a film and be with their dogs.”

“Out of 27,000 theaters registered on CinemaTour.com, there were no dog-friendly venues,” Lankford said. “I had to do all the paper work and figure it out myself.”

And figure he did, buying K9’s “hole in the wall” Plano property where he began showing films a couple days a week to locals and their dogs.

Now K9 is a six-days-a-week operation, offering a co-working space on weekdays where dog owners can get out of the office and hang with their canine friends while working on the local WiFi. Fridays and Saturdays are movie nights, and for $15, dogs and their owners can watch movies on leather couches and drink wine to their heart’s content.