Movie theater
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema." --Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953) by Adonis A. Kyrou |
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A movie theater (North America), also known as a cinema (Australia, United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as North America), a movie house, or the pictures, is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ("movies" or "films"). Most cinemas are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing a ticket.
Programming
Movie theaters may be classified by the type of movies or when they are shown:
- First-run theater: A theater that runs primarily mainstream film fare from the major film companies and distributors, during the initial new release period of each film.
- Second-run or discount theater: A theater that runs films that have already shown in the first-run theaters and presented at a lower ticket price. (These are sometimes known as dollar theaters or "Cheap Seats".)
- Repertoire/repertory theater or arthouse: A theater that presents more alternative and art films as well as second-run and classic films (often known as an "Independent Cinema" in the UK).
- An adult theater or sex theater specializes in showing pornographic movies.
- IMAX theaters can show conventional movies, but the major benefits of the IMAX system are only available when showing movies filmed using it. While a few mainstream feature films have been produced in IMAX, IMAX movies are often documentaries featuring spectacular natural scenery, and may be limited to the 45-minute length of a single reel of IMAX film.
See also
- Edisonia Hall
- British Board of Film Classification
- Film
- Film screening
- Fictional film
- Home cinema
- List of film formats
- Motion Picture Association of America
- Movie palace
- Nickelodeon movie theater