Tag: theater

Quick Links: Summer Movie Marathon 2013

A little over a year ago, I attended the Hollywood Nights 24 hour movie marathon at Celebration Cinema North in Grand Rapids. Crazy coincidence – this guy had a spontaneous in-theater movie marathon only a week after I did.

I thoroughly approve of his rationale of why he did it (“because it’s there!”). From his article:

It was interesting to see how people responded to the notion of seeing five movies in theatres in a single day. My initial instinct was that it was madness, an opinion shared by many others; others thought it wasn’t a big deal, remembering Oscar marathons or film festivals where they sat in theatres for just as long if not longer. What everyone could agree on, however, is that it’s decidedly abnormal, which is why I jumped on the chance to attempt it once I realized it was temporally possible.

I also enjoyed his observations on the practicalities of the marathon and his general observations on culture through the lens of 2013 movies.Give his article a read when you get a chance.

Image by Miles McNutt

Movie Marathon Scheduler for Movie Theaters

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.

A sample movie theater marathon schedule.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.

Movie Marathon Theater Scheduling Tool

When I recently did an in-theater 24-hour movie marathon, I worked out my viewing schedule by hand, trying to maximize the number of movies I could see without overlapping them. It was labor intensive and kind of boring.

I guess I should have done my research first – Movie Madness.org could have done that for me automatically! This tool puts together every possible combination of viewing schedule, then sorts by schedules that are maximally efficient (i.e. most movies you can see, given the viewing schedule) based on your parameters (i.e. are you willing to overlap movie start/end times a bit? What movies should you include/exclude?).

I find the viewpoint behind the site kind of lame (“Stick it to the man and theater-hop for free! Its okay because big companies don’t deserve to make money because they charge us money for goods and services that we enjoy consuming! And that sucks! It should all be free because we say so! Blarg!”) But, they put together a simple and easy-to-use tool, so there you go.

Longest Movie Marathon?

UPDATE: This world record is unverified by Guinness World Records. Click here to learn more about the longest verified-by-Guinness movie marathon.

This 200-hour movie marathon seems completely impossible. I’m kind of tired after a 24-hour movie marathon, but doing eight of them in a row? That’s a brutal experience, and plain ‘ol dangerous. Sleep deprivation causes crazy neurological problems and hallucinations after just a couple of days. And these guys stayed awake for eight? Really?

I suppose the Guinness world record for hours awake is 449 hours, so these guys had some hours to spare. Still – the main point of a movie marathon is to have fun, not pretend you are in some kind of Ironman triathlon!.