The prices of movie tickets continue to rise as time goes on, so a trip to see the next big Marvel movie has become an event people have to plan and save up for. This causes quite the problem for the movie-loving ‘broke college student,’ who lives off ramen noodles and coffee.
In order to solve this conundrum, Slippery Rock University Student Government Association connected with Swank Motion Pictures to start showing popular movies for free every weekend in the Smith Student Center theater.
Within SGA, the Committee for Campus Outreach licenses movies through Swank Motion Pictures, an organization which offers pre-home releases of movies to college campuses.
However, with recent pushes to increase marketing and bring in more students to movie showings, Chad Burdick, the Vice President of Campus Outreach, says he selected the movies for this semester over the summer.
The decision for what movies were picked came down to a few different reasons based on previous committee decisions, Burdick explained.
“It’s kind of a mix of a couple things,” Burdick said. “For instance, around Halloween, we show ‘Hotel Transylvania.’ We try to keep it themed to what’s actually relevant to what’s going on, but at the same time, we do pick movies to get as many people as we can.”
Last weekend, “Tag” was the film of the week, a movie that made $77.3 million in the box office.
According to Burdick, it brought in a lot of students, which were some of the best numbers SGA had seen in a while, especially on Friday and Saturday night.
Swank also recommends movies based on turnouts at other campuses, which resulted in the screening of “Avengers: Infinity War” as a welcome-back movie.
Currently, students are unable to view a full list of upcoming movies in the SGA movie series on CORE, but Burdick wants to change this.
“Right now, our committee is working on getting everything on CORE,” Burdick said. “So, pretty much that’s where we post a news post. On our feed we have them posted, but we’re actually going to have them be promotions so every week with the new movies, the main feed that goes to Slippery Rock University’s home page will have it.”
There are five slots each week:
Friday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Saturday at 8 p.m.
Sunday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Burdick said the afternoon shows expect around ten to twenty students while the later shows bring around forty to sixty each night. SGA hopes to boost those numbers further by adding giveaways and continuing to offer free popcorn at the 8 p.m. showings.
“Personally, [I’m excited about] ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp.’ I never liked superhero movies as a kid and I got into them as an adult and I really like them,” Burdick laughed.
