Pizza night movie logbooks
Keeping track of our favorites
Hey y’all,
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. We quickly ramped up to stuff like Batman ‘66, The Sword in the Stone, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Star Wars, etc. The Common Sense Media website helped a lot: we could review the plot lines and fill the young one in on what was going to happen and assure him that everything would turn out okay.
I keep track of all the movies we watch in the day’s entry in my logbook, but I hadn’t made a big list of them until recently.
One star = Everybody really liked it, would watch again.
Two stars = Everybody loved it, feels like a classic.
Something that’s really important to me about movie night — and all moviegoing experiences nowadays — is not to go in with any expectations. Sure, I’d love the kids to love the same movies as I do, but I don’t need them to. I love seeing old stuff through their eyes. Some stuff just doesn’t hit for them the way it hit for me. (Ghostbusters and Back to the Future, for example.) Some stuff they aren’t quite ready for. Some stuff they love that I can’t stand. (Like the Wimpy Kid movies.)
Some of the stars and no stars 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.
Something I love: We’ll never, ever run out of movies to watch! It’s simply impossible. There’s always something to look forward to.
As for picking the movies: I do most of the programming. I keep a big list of possibilities in the Reelgood app, and go with what feels right on Friday night.
Occasionally something will hit and I’ll program around that: We did an Aardman series after Shaun The Sheep was a huge hit, a classic Pixar series, we watched a bunch of stuff from the Disney Renaissance after we went to Disneyland, and we watched a bunch of Frankenstein spinoff movies after they loved the original.
We haven’t seen a bunch of stuff! Some stuff I’m saving. For example, I’ve been waiting for the right time to do a Studio Ghibli run-through. (You’ll note that My Neighbor Totoro is missing from the list — that’s just because we watched it when the kids were really little. Same for Singin’ in the Rain: I took my oldest to see that at the Paramount theater when he was only four.)
I’ll take recommendations from other people, but I’ve learned to do my research first! For example: I did not realize the new Jumanji movies were PG-13. My kids loved them, but I’m not sure they were totally appropriate. Then again, that’s probably why they loved them. I’m sometimes surprised by what I watched when I was nine:
Back in 2021, I made a list of pizza night blockbusters from that year (Meg’s dough recipe is at the bottom!) but here’s an updated list of our absolute favorites, in case you want recommendations.
All ages:
Robin Hood (Disney, 1973)
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Paddington 2
Lilo and Stitch
The Wizard of Oz
The LEGO Movie
Toy Story
Ratatouille
The Shaun the Sheep Movie
The Mitchells Vs. The Machines
A Charlie Brown Christmas
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Elf
Older kiddos:
Frankenstein
King Kong
Jurassic Park
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Into the Spider-Verse
Home Alone
TV:
Bluey
Gravity Falls
Hilda
SpongeBob
Again, I don’t think these are the all-time greatest or anything, just stuff we all liked.
Okay, now tell me your favorite movies to watch with your family in the comments!
xoxo,
Austin
A tradition my husband and I started when our son hit his early teens was Sunday movie night. The magic was that we rotated who got to pick, and the other two weren’t allowed to complain. It gave us the chance to introduce movies we loved to each other and selfishly, we could force our old favorites on him--some of which he loved (“Ferris Bueller”), some of which did not at all hold up (“Blair Witch,” to which he rolled his eyes, “this would never happen now, we all have phones with maps on them”). He’s in college now but when he’s home, he still keeps track of whose turn it is!
Austin, my kids are all grown and gone now! We had movie nights, (sometimes starting at noon - lol) and they also grew up during the “Blockbuster Days”. I never kept a log but we did eat a lot of pizza, KFC, and Chinese food! Any Disney movie, as well as the Goonies, and my favorite, Apollo 13, were classics for us. They were also into cheap B type horror flicks. ( I am afraid about mentioning some of the films here, lol ). Today though, we have movie nights all the time - minus kid’s - and I am pretty sure I am going to pick a specific night and turn it into a pizza fest as well. At 67, I still love to watch Disney and the Toy Story series gets me all the time. I do believe that I am getting to vicariously live my life from those years again by the wonderful stories you share. It is no wonder why your creativity is such a shining light in the world...trust me, it shines bright Austin! Thank you for all of this, and thank you for creating this community for all of us to share your journey with you!