Jessica Marie Garcia Stars in Vampire Comedy Filmed Inside Atlanta's Plaza Theatre

Jessica Marie Garcia will star in and produce a vampire comedy set inside one of Atlanta's best-known cinemas. Deadline announced the project on 13 November 2026.

The film is Randy Mandy and the Curse of the Plaza Theatre, a comedy from Dawn of the Jerks Pictures. Garcia plays Mandy Alejandra Pike, a British Latina vampire. In the story, her maker, Vicente, has held her captive as the only employee of the Plaza Theatre since 1939.

The real Plaza opened in December 1939, the same year the film's captivity begins. According to Deadline, it is Atlanta's longest continuously operating independent cinema, meaning it has never been part of a large chain. It is also the home of the Atlanta Film Festival, a festival whose awards can count toward Oscar eligibility.

Kristina Arjona directs the film from a script she wrote with Leanna Adams. That script won Arjona the 2026 Narrative Justice Filmmaker Award from the Women of Color Narrative Initiative, working with the Visionary Justice StoryLab.

Garcia is producing alongside Kiah Clingman of KiahCan Productions, Marie Halliday of Curious Witch Films, and Patricia Taylor. Richard Taylor, Patricia Taylor and Plaza owner Christopher Escobar are executive producers. Executive producers usually oversee funding and business arrangements rather than the day-to-day work on set.

Garcia is best known to many viewers for her television work. She played Jasmine Flores on Netflix's On My Block and Willow Cruz on Disney Channel's Liv and Maddie.

Filming is set to begin in 2027, on location at the Plaza Theatre itself. That means the building that inspired the story will also serve as the set, with no release date or distributor named yet in the announcement.

For anyone who has spent a rainy afternoon in an old movie house, the setting is the hook. A cinema with a single staff member, a century-old lobby and a vampire on the payroll is a premise that could only come from a place like the Plaza.