HACKER Q&A
📣 higgins

Are Midnight Screenings Dead?


The Matrix Resurrections tickets went on sale today and no theaters in the city I'll be in (Portland, OR) are having a midnight showing.

I love the camaraderie developed in line for a midnight release. The whole theater feels electric.

I'm a bit bummed this won't be the case for this new Matrix. Feels like a hugely missed opportunity.

Is it an artifact of COVID-times, the fact that this is simultaneously released on HBO or something else?

  👤 Jtsummers Accepted Answer ✓
Midnight releases mostly ended after the Aurora theater shooting (2012), at least that's when I saw it end. They switched to 8 or 10pm releases and then close up. Which doesn't seem like much of a countermeasure, I suspect it was because audiences, themselves, stopped showing up at midnight for a while and theaters never resumed midnight showings.

Also, midnight releases don't work well for families that want to bring kids. And with the near-death of R-rated movies (in the US) most of the big movies (Marvel, Star Wars, many Harry Potter movies, and so on) are made for a larger (not exclusively or primarily adult) audience. To get the bigger crowd, you show it earlier.