National Movie Night Date in the current year: June 14, 2024

The art of cinema has been around for more than a century. The first commercial movie screening took place at the Grand Cafe in Paris in 1895, and the first dedicated movie theaters began to emerge soon after. For several decades, people could only watch movies in theaters, but the introduction of home video changed everything and made family movie nights possible.

In 1977, Magnetic Video Corporation became the first company to sign a licensing agreement with a major studio (20th Century Fox) and release movies on Betamax and VHS video cassettes to be sold directly to consumers. Soon after, George Atkinson opened the first video rental store in the United States.

Betamax and VHS competed throughout the late 1970s and 1980s in what is known as the videotape format war, which was ultimately won by VHS. However, in the early 2000s, the video cassette format began to be gradually displaced by the DVD format. Another format war, where HD DVD competed with Blu-ray, lasted from 2006 to 2008; Blu-ray won.

As streaming media began to gain popularity in the 2010s, family movie nights became even easier to organize, because streaming services eliminated the need to go to a rental store. All you need to do if you want to host an impromptu movie night is grab some snacks and choose a movie on Netflix, Disney+ or whatever streaming service you prefer.

National Movie Night was launched by digital creator and former journalist Jennifer Borget and her oldest daughter Jayda, the team behind the Family Movie Night Journal. The Borgets created the journal and founded National Movie Night to share their weekly family tradition of movie nights and encourage people to enjoy movies with their loved ones.

The best way to participate in National Movie Night is, of course, to host a movie night for your family and friends. Ask everyone to bring snacks and drinks to share (don’t forget to coordinate who brings what if you don’t wand to end up with a dozen bowls of popcorn and nothing more), choose a movie or two to watch, and enjoy them with the people you love.

To make your movie night more interesting, you can dress up as your favorite movie characters, rent a projector and screen and have a movie night in your backyard (just make sure you won’t disturb your neighbors; maybe you can invite them to join you?), play movie-themed party games, share your favorite movie quotes (and make your friends guess the movies they’re from), or spend the evening at a drive-in theater. And don’t forget to spread the word on social media with the hashtag #NationalMovieNight!

Movie nights help us make time for our loved ones and bond with our families, of course, if we have them more often than once a year. National Movie Night is a great incentive to start your own weekly or at least monthly family movie night tradition. You can rotate picking movies or genres (musical, adventure, sci-fi and fantasy, thrillers, superhero movies, book adaptations, etc.) so that each family member gets to choose at some point.