Our school's enrollment is 570. Be real careful about showing a film if you have not bought the rights to it. SWANK is online and when they sent their information it was interesting. Our school district is buying a liscense for the school year after reading the information. Hope this helps!
We had a movie night this year and it was the greatest thing we have done yet. Did not charge for the movie and we rented a popcorn machine and popped fresh popcorn all night long....charge 25 cents for a bag of popcorn bought soda and water at Sam's Club sold those for 25cents each and the whole evening said and done cost us 24.00. The soda we made no money on (broke even) the water we made .11 and the popcorn we made .14 a bag and that all in returned paid for the rental of the popcorn machine. We have a large screen in our gym and projector that we can put vcr tapes in. We showed the road to eldorodeo and used the soundtrack music before and after. IT WAS A BIG HIT! Good luck.
We did a movie night in March of this year our first one ever. We purchased the rights to a movie through SWANK which I am guessing cost us roughly $150.00 (we showed Disney's Cool Runnings). They had other movies to choose from including newer releases. We used our high school auditorium and sold concession type food in the lobby (popcorn we popped from our machine, candy, pop). We bought the food from Sam's and charged a little more so we would make a profit. Then we had a themed basket auction. Each child from each class donated an item for their classroom theme and a whole bunch of moms put these items into baskets and decorated them up pretty! We made $1400 off from the baskets alone. We roughly made $1800 from the whole thing after we paid out for the custodian, the auditorium, etc. I hope this helps!
I think I can help you on that a little bit. We just did a movie night last month. What we did was something a little different. We had a large screen donated from a local theatre group. We rented a projecter ($100), had the music teacher hook up speakers, and hung the screen from the basket ball hoop in the gym. The movie and sound was great...just like being in a theatre. We showed two movies.
When you want to show a copyrighted movie, there is a slight way to get around paying a fee. You cant charge to view a copyrighted movie....hence, to see our movies, it was free. What we did to make it into a money maker, was to purchase candy, sodas, and nachos, and we rented a popcorn machine, and we in turn sold the munchies to the people who attended the movie. It wasnt a big money maker because it was the first time we had ever done a movie night. But, we had so much candy left over and everyone had such a great time, that we have decided to do it every month next year. After the first one, we should start making money.
quick question about movie nights, how expensive is it to order the movie (copyright etc)? Does it vary from movie to movie? (ie: are disney movies more expensive than non disney?) thanks, maggie