Firstly, the SA docs on Session.add() do not mention anything about the method's return value, so I would assume it is expected to return None.

Secondly, I think you meant to add new_movie to the session, not movies(**movie_details), whatever that is :)

Thirdly, the standard Pyramid session (the one configured with ZopeTransactionExtension) is tied to Pyramid's request-response cycle, which may produce unexpected behavior in your situation. You need to configure a separate session which you will need to commit manually in store_movie_details. This session needs to use scoped_session so the session object is thread-local and is not shared across threads.

from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

session_factory = sessionmaker(bind=some_engine)
AsyncSession = scoped_session(session_factory)

def store_movie_details(movie_id):

    session = AsyncSession()
    movie_details = scrape_data(movie_id)
    new_movie = Movie(**movie_details) # Movie is my model.

    session.add(new_movie)
    session.commit()

And, of course, this approach is only suitable for very light-weight tasks, and if you don't mind occasionally losing a task (when the webserver restarts, for example). For anything more serious have a look at Celery etc. as Antoine Leclair suggests.