Noovie or (The Unexpected Virtue of Finding a Weird Hobby)

By Sam Burzinski
Blog Content Contributor

If you’ve ever been to a movie a little bit on the earlier side, you may have caught the last few minutes of whatever pre-show sequence the movie theater is contractually obligated to display before each picture. Usually it’s some assortment of trivia, pleas to join newsletters for things you don’t care about, or the same M&M’s commercial that’ll be there until the end of time; you know the one.

If you’re like me (neurotic, anxious, terrified of being late to anything ever) and you show up about 30 minutes before the showtime that’ll never change no matter how much you scramble to leave the house, then you often end up seeing this pre-show sequence every single time you sit down for a movie.

And none compare to the glorious majesty that is Noovie.

Now, I’ll cop to this right out of the gate: my love for Noovie began, as most things do for insincere teenage boys, out of the sheer irony of it. It’s lame, corny, you can find influencers begging you to go see “Shazam 2” on pretty much every digital street corner if you look hard enough and the thing I best know Maria Menounos from is Season 14 of “Dancing with the Stars” (in which she placed fourth behind Green Bay Packers legend Donald Driver.) However, there’s something about exposure therapy that draws you in.

As previously stated, I leave my apartment to go to the movie theater far, far earlier than I have any need to in order to make sure that I don’t miss a second of the film. As a result of this, my movie-going experience usually break down into something like this:

• Walk into theater
• Get Apple Wallet ticket scanned by front desk employee, who will inevitably give you a weird look for arriving to see “My Fair Lady” an hour ahead of the posted showtime
• Wait outside theater for previous film showing to end
• Wait inside empty theater, almost always alone
• Get jumpscared by a very loud Maria Menounos imploring you to stick around for games, trivia, and more
• Watch movie
• Leave theater

Now, why do I love such a vapid piece of corporate advertising and shilling to get you to be more “invested” in whatever franchise blockbuster is coming next down the pipeline?. Because it’s mine, and having something that feels like “yours” is one of the most important things to have in life, I think.

I’ve become something of an unintentional folk hero among my close peers due to my adoration of Noovie, as for the past 30 weeks–almost every Sunday since seeing three movies in one day for “National $5 Movie Day”–I’ve updated my loyal friends and family on the Noovie they’re showing in the local Springtown Center EVO Entertainment. The most variance these pictures get is some sort of pithy tagline I write, always containing the word “Noovie” in some esoteric sense. And now, for some inexplicable reason, I get tagged by my friends left and right when they see Noovie in the wild, and it makes me absolutely overjoyed to see everyone else join in on the Noovie mania.

Like I said, the enjoyment of Noovie is something that felt like it was “mine,” in a sense. Transitioning into college out of high school was particularly tough. I had way, way more free time on my hands that I had any right to know what to do with. The most frequent suggestions from advice columns and helpful acquaintances was always “Just get a hobby!” For me, this was almost comically daunting. Hobby? Every day my routine is that I wake up, do some stuff and go to sleep–the thought of developing a hobby required distinct choice-making skills and a passion for anything in particular, both things I lacked in abundance.

Any sort of hobby that I would’ve liked to pick up either required a great deal of money or resulted in me feeling inauthentic; that whatever hobby I’d pick up would lead to a weird sort of impostor syndrome that I was a phony in that field. If it was something popular, my lack of experience made it feel like I stuck out like a sore thumb and that’s something I can’t mentally handle.

However, many theater chains participate in the “Flashback Cinema” program, in which older movies are scheduled to be shown for extraordinarily cheap. The average movie ticket price in 2022, according to the research firm EntTelligence, was $11.75. In comparison, every Flashback Cinema ticket is only $5, extraordinarily affordable on a summer camp employee and college student’s budget.

As time went on, and I steadily filled up my movie backlog from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to “Gone with the Wind,” the routine of Noovie was comfortable, somehow. It was a constant during a weird state of flux in my life, and by some odd turn of events, enjoying Noovie became a hobby for me in and of itself.

If you take one lesson and nothing else from this article, I want it to be that you should go out at your earliest convenience, see a movie at a theater that participates in Noovie, and enjoy yourself! Oh, and find something fulfilling in your life that you enjoy doing day after day and provides you and those who are close to you with joy. That too.

Featured Image from Mark Ashman, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).