No Better Way To Spend My Thursday Night

Tonight, for the fourth year in a row, I’ll be sitting in a theatre watching an installment of The Hunger Games. After three years, it’s time to say goodbye. I still remember the first time that I went, seeing the first movie with my two best friends from high school. It was an amazing night, and happened to be one of my friends’ birthday, and we were all ecstatic – we’d all read the books, and this adaptation looked amazing.

Midnight movies have a special place in my heart. I think my first midnight movie was The Dark Knight, when I was 13 or 14 years old. My aunt took me and my cousin on a whim, and I ended up struggling to stay awake, since I had been up all day. But it was an exciting night – when Lieutenant Gordon came out of the back of the van, proving that he was alive, not dead, the entire theatre erupted in applause. A couple of years later, I saw both Twilight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at midnight (I refused to choose between them – both guilty pleasures in my opinion) – theatres filled with hundreds of teen girls, all buzzing thirty minutes or an hour before the show, and I soaked it all in.

Now, I’m a bit older, and see more sophisticated things, read: Rocky Horror Picture Show, I still remember what it was like to be in high school, to be up at midnight, and to be part of a community that cares about something.

The tragedy of today, though, is that nothing really happens at midnight. Perhaps the midnight movie was more of a resurgence rather than just something I didn’t know about till I was older, but for movie executives, these nights are a way to make oodles of money. Which is kind of sad, because when I see Mockingjay at 11:15 tonight, I know, deep down, I shouldn’t be seeing it until midnight, and that the theatre I’m at has been showing Mockingjay since 7:30 earlier tonight. That hardly seems fair – the movie’s release date isn’t until 12:01 tonight, officially.

However, I will say that the extra movie times allow thousands of people to see the movie, when a lot of them would have been turned away had the theatre limited the release to only 12:01.

No matter what, midnight movies are something I love, and will always love. It’s one of the most unique ways you can see a movie, when going to a theatre is at an all time low.

So I challenge you, even if it’s not tonight with The Hunger Games, or in a month with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, to go see a midnight movie with your friends. Go to the State, go to Rave, go anywhere.

I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to spend my Thursday night. Can you?