We love NEW movies!

It happens anywhere from 6 to 12 times a year: The Roxy presents a brand new film, on its national opening day.

The first movie we had "on the break" was MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II, which came out in 2000. Of course we'd been wanting to play brand-new movies for years and were willing to pay the higher prices to play them; but it took a change in movie-company attitudes to make it happen.

By the late '90s, boxoffice results had become a huge Monday-morning water-cooler topic. Every studio was determined to wind up on top of the charts with the latest blockbuster. This led to an ever-increasing desire to break opening weekend records.

After years of requests from small theatres to make movies available faster, the film companies finally decided that if they put their films onto as many screens as possible on the opening weekend (including small ones), they'd increase their boxoffice sales. Seems like elementary math, but it only took them 105 years to come up with it.

So far this year, we've already had three films on the break: Nim's Island, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and Horton Hears a Who. Upcoming opening-day titles include Wall-E, The Dark Knight, Madagascar II and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And probably a few surprises we don't know about yet!

By the way, you can tell if we hope to open a movie on the break by looking at its poster in our lobby. If the release date is showing on the poster, the movie will probably be here on that date. If the date is blanked out, it means we'll still probably play the film, but it'll be two or three weeks after the national release.