Movie Theatre Day

The Day I Stood in Line for Star Wars

I was there opening day for Star Wars in 1977.

I stood in line on day one, and that line wrapped around the theater a couple of times. It was a phenomenon. People waited for hours, ramped up and excited, and when the first showing let out, the crowd came pouring through the doors looking like they had just seen something that changed everything. I was in the second showing. They were right.

You can’t get that at home. That’s the point of Movie Theatre Day. That falls on April 23. The date marks the 1896 debut of the Vitascope projector in a New York music hall, the first time Americans watched a projected film together in a room. The holiday celebrates the theater itself as a place.

The theater does something a screen at home cannot.

A giant image, a dark room, a sound system that puts you inside the scene, and a few hundred strangers reacting at the same time. You feel a crowd gasp. You hear a whole room laugh. The shared experience is half the point, and it’s the half streaming will never deliver.

I review a lot of movies. Over a thousand of them, cataloged by genre on my other site. So I’m not a casual viewer pretending the theater is sacred. I just know the difference between watching a film and being immersed in one, and a packed house on opening night is the second thing in its purest form.

Watch: The Rise and Fall...and Rise of Movie Theaters, Burback

The Films That Deserve the Big Screen

Not every movie needs a theater. A quiet drama plays fine on your couch. But some films are built for scale, and watching them small is a waste.

The big spectacle movies are the obvious ones. Disaster films where the wave swallows the city. Science fiction where the ship fills the frame. War films where the battle surrounds you. I keep a running list of the greatest disaster films and another on the films with the best opening scenes, and almost every one of them hits harder in a theater. The opening of a great film, played loud on a giant screen, grabs you in a way a laptop never will.

There’s a craft lesson buried in this for writers too. I keep a list of films every fiction writer should study, because the best of them teach structure, pacing, and how to open a story so the audience can’t leave. A theater strips away every distraction and forces you to watch, the best way to learn from a film.

Why the Theater Is Fading

The movie theater is fading, and it’s fading for the same reason the independent bookstore is.

Streaming made watching movies effortless. Why drive to a theater, pay for parking, pay too much for a ticket, and pay again for popcorn when the same film shows up on your TV a few weeks later for a fraction of the cost?

Most people made that math and stopped going. The theaters that survive run on thin margins and depend on whoever still shows up.

It’s the same problem I write about with books and ebooks. The convenient option wins, even when it’s the worse experience, because convenience almost always beats quality in the marketplace. And there’s a familiar catch underneath it. When you stream a movie, you don’t own it. The service can pull it, change it, or lose the rights, and your purchase vanishes. When you went to a theater, at least you owned the memory of seeing it the way it was meant to be seen.

I wrote more about that ownership problem in my piece on why you don’t really own your ebooks, and the logic is identical.

The Movies They Changed on You

There’s one more thing about the theater that matters to me, and Star Wars is the perfect example.

The version I saw on opening day in 1977 doesn’t really exist anymore as an official release.

George Lucas spent decades tweaking the original trilogy, adding digital effects, swapping scenes, and changing moments that fans remembered exactly as they were. Some of his changes I agree with. A few cleaned-up effects look fine. But others gutted what made the films work.

The most famous one is who shot first. In the original 1977 cut, Han shoots the bounty hunter Greedo under the table, cold, because that’s who Han is at that point in the story. Lucas later changed it so Greedo shoots first and misses. That turns Han from a hard-edged smuggler into a guy defending himself. It’s a small edit that wrecks the character. Han shot first. Everyone who saw it in the theater knows it.

Lucas didn’t want the original theatrical version released, so for years there was no clean copy to buy. A fan named Petr Harmáček, working alone for free, rebuilt the original trilogy from old film prints into something called the Despecialized Edition. It’s the closest thing to what I saw in that theater in 1977, the films the way they were before anyone changed them.

A fan having to reconstruct it, because the studio buried the original, is the same ownership problem I keep running into with books and ebooks. You think you own the thing you grew up with. Someone else controls the version that survives.

I keep a list of films that couldn’t be made today, and a less polite one I call modern movie slop. The theater was once where bold, original films found their audience. Now the big screen mostly serves franchise product built by committee, while a streaming service buries the interesting work where nobody finds it.

How do you spend Movie Theatre Day?

Go to a movie. That’s the whole assignment, and it’s a good one.

Pick something built for the big screen. A spectacle, an epic, something loud and visual that uses everything the theater offers. If there’s a restored classic playing at an old movie palace near you, even better, because those theaters are works of art themselves and most of them are barely hanging on. Buying a ticket is the only thing that keeps them open.

Then make it a habit. The theater won’t survive on nostalgia. It survives on people showing up. If you love what the big screen does, the way I do despite my complaints, the answer is simple. Go more often, see the films that deserve the scale, and keep the dark room alive a little longer.

Movie Theatre Day FAQ