12 tips for a great family movie night

A dozen things we've learned from our favorite family ritual

TLDR: Pepperoni pizza and Jurassic Park — you can’t go wrong (And yeah, we’ve watched it on VHS!)

Hey y’all,

The holidays are over. The kids are back in school. The only thing left to look forward to this week is pizza night!

Every Friday night our family eats pizza and watches a movie. As I’ve written before:

In the beginning, there was pizza, but no movies. My youngest son would get too sad or scared or upset to sit through a feature film. “One day,” I thought, “One day we will be able to all sit down and eat pizza and watch a real movie together.”

That day came during the first Christmastime of the pandemic, when the youngest was approaching age six. We started with gentle, short viewings, like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Muppet Family Christmas, It’s A SpongeBob Christmas!, and even Elf. (My log notes that “Jules cried, but we made it through.”)

In 2021, when the boys were 8 and 6, Friday night pizza and a movie truly became a family ritual, something we looked forward to every week, something we did almost without fail.

Starred indicates a hit, double stars equals a knockout hit

We just completed our fifth year of pizza night! People ask me about it a lot, so I wanted to make a little list of tips we’ve learned along the way. (If you’d like Meghan’s dough recipe, it’s in this letter.)

1. Be patient. You have plenty of time. Don’t introduce movies too soon! Lots of young kids are sensitive and can’t even make it through a whole movie. Try starting with short, animated specials. (Christmas is a great time for this.) In the early days, it’s hard to go wrong with Bluey or The Muppets.

2. Spoilers are fine! If you have a young/sensitive viewer, just go ahead and let them read the plot summary of what you’re about to watch. Knowing the ending doesn’t ruin the story. It helps kids relax and enjoy.

3. Don’t expect your kids to like the stuff you loved as a kid. Go in without any expectations. Watch how they react, listen to what they say about it, and program the next movie accordingly. It’s great when your kids love the same movies you did, but it’s also enlightening to see old stuff through their eyes. (Ghostbusters, for example, did nothing for my kids. Ghostbusters!)

4. If you have more than one kid, you have to program for the youngest. Eventually, depending on the age spread and the sensitivities of the youngest, you can program for the average of their ages.

5. Use Common Sense Media or other parent guides to get a feel for what’s in a movie. And be sure to look up movies that other people recommend. If you’re an elder millennial or older you probably watched wildly inappropriate things at a young age. Also, there are a ton of “classics” that haven’t aged well. (For example: Peter Pan is incredibly racist and Back To The Future has an attempted sexual assault.) These can be good opportunities for family discussion, of course (one night were were watching a movie and my oldest said, “Wow, this movie has all the ‘isms’ in it!”) but it’s okay on Friday night to just want to watch something nice and inoffensive and forget the world for a bit.

Some of these might make you raise your eyebrows — Angry Birds gets a star but The Princess Bride doesn’t? That’s the way it shook out those nights. Like I said: don’t introduce things too early!

6. Start with the easy, classic stuff. Pixar is hard to beat. (Toy Story, Wall-E, Ratatouille, Monsters, Inc., Coco, etc.) You could watch a Pixar movie every week and it would take you through at least half the year.

Classic Disney animation can be terrifying (Dumbo) and/or cringe and/or offensive and/or outdated, but I love stuff like Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, The Sword in the Stone, 101 Dalmations, and maybe my favorite animated movie of all-time, Robin Hood. I also like a bunch of the Disney Renaissance (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, etc.)

I think mid-century live-action Disney stuff is really underrated. Mary Poppins, sure, but also Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Swiss Family Robinson. (An unexpected hit in our house: Blackbeard’s Ghost.)

Everyone should know the movies of Aardman Animations. (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, Shaun The Sheep, etc.) Brilliant, fun stuff.

Studio Ghibli, too, especially Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro.

Ages 8 & 10 is when I felt like pizza night really got cooking for us. Some of this stuff pushed the youngest, but most was solid.

7. Once you have a ten-year-old, Jurassic Park is the perfect movie. It doesn’t get any better.

8. The 90s are… underrated? When you blow through the classics and have to start digging deep. My kids love 90s stuff like Air Bud, The Sandlot, Beethoven, etc. My sense is that the 90s were kind of the last great era of live action movies made for kids and families.

9. 90 minutes is the perfect movie length. I don’t know why all movies are 2 hours and 20 minutes now but it sucks. I love old Universal monster movies for this very reason: a lot of them barely pass an hour: Frankenstein and The Invisible Man are only 70 minutes long! Creature from the Black Lagoon is only 79 minutes long! They rule.

Ages 9 & 11 was a little tricky — we’d blown through a lot of stuff and had to start digging more.

10. Program around the seasons. It’s fun to have a theme and a little continuity between movies. In late September and October, we watch spooky stuff or baseball movies. In December we watch Christmas movies. (It’s usually the only time our kids want to re-watch movies.) Last year we did “noir November” and it was great — stuff like Dick Tracy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

11. Do baths/showers before pizza night. It is incredibly painful when you’ve just watched a great movie, eaten half a pizza and maybe half a bottle of wine, and now you have to get your kids bathed. Get the kids clean and cozy in their PJs on before the show begins.

A solid year with some major bangers. Over The Garden Wall, btw, can be watched as chapters in a single 2-hour movie.

12. Swim upstream. Play a long game. Start with their genuine interests and the kinds of movies they like to watch and figure out how you might slowly make your way to the stuff you really want to watch with them. Two years ago, my kids loved Hundreds of Beavers, so I thought I’d sneak in one of its ancestors, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

Okay! I’d love to hear from y’all whether you have tips for pizza night and/or any favorite movies you like to watch with your crew:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here’s a list of Kleon pizza night blockbusters from 2001-2003: