I had a great time at my first 24 hour movie marathon in a real theater. But you know what would have helped? A movie marathon scheduler. When you have 18 different movies playing throughout the day at various times, any tool that help you schedule out your own personal marathon sure would have been helpful.
I recently found TheaterTag.com. Its interface is slick and simple – you enter in your zip code, pick a theater, pick what movies you want to see – and bang – a fill-in-the-blanks schedule is created for you. You just slide around the movies you want to see until you create a schedule that works for you. Here is a screenshot.
The only drawback is that TheaterTag does not automatically generate working schedules for you. This was a feature of the Movie Madness movie marathon scheduler. Movie Madness automatically generates a large list of possible movie schedules, based on your search criteria. Well, it did anyway – it apparently hasn’t been updated since 2007 and doesn’t work these days.
Regardless, I don’t miss this feature much. I think it is more fun to manually create your own schedule. It helps build the anticipation!
So next time I have a movie marathon in a theater, I’ll be using this tool to plan it all out. I might even use it to plan an extended visit to the theater. I’ve never actually seen more than one movie at a time in a theater before (excluding the one 24-hour marathon)! I think it would be fun to just take a day off sometime and just watch movies all day. No work, no chores, no obligations – just entertainment!
One disclaimer though – I do not endorse theater hopping. If I spend a day at the movies, I’m paying for the experience. Cheating the theater out of money just isn’t my cup of tea.
