Midtown Cinema at 25

Twenty-five years after three movie screens flickered to life in Harrisburg, Midtown Cinema is throwing itself a birthday party.

There will be cake, naturally. There will be music and games. There will be movies inside and outside, with Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” on one screen and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” lighting up the parking lot after dark.

A Barbenheimer birthday bash for a neighborhood movie theater feels strangely appropriate. When the two radically different films opened together in 2023, audiences turned going to the movies into an event. They dressed up. They planned double features. They gathered.

Midtown Cinema has spent much of the last quarter century finding different ways to get people to do exactly that.

Founded in 2001 by Allen Brown and Todd Shill, the three-screen arthouse began with a simple purpose: bring independent and foreign films to Harrisburg audiences who might otherwise never have the chance to see them in a theater.

The building at 250 Reily St. had already lived several lives. It opened as an Acme Market in 1940, later became a plasma donation center, and eventually became home to Midtown Cinema.

Midtown Cinema, circa 1940, as Acme Markets.

Among the films playing during Midtown’s earliest days were David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” and Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone.”

Getting to 25, however, was hardly a straight line.

By 2008, Midtown Cinema was struggling and its future was uncertain. The building was sold, acquired as part of a larger development project.

That is where the story of Midtown’s second act begins, appropriately enough, with a moviegoer.

Betty “Granny” Andrews, Abby Tierney’s mother, lived with Abby and her husband, developer John Tierney. She was also a devoted Midtown patron, going to movies there with her cousins every week.

John and Abby remember Granny as extraordinarily easygoing. Very little rattled her.

Then John came home and told her the cinema might be shuttered for the project. The cinema land was to be used to build a parking garage.

“She was changed,” John recalled.

The family remembers Granny making her position quite clear to her son-in-law: if he closed that cinema, he shouldn’t bother coming home.

John and Abby began talking seriously about whether the cinema could be preserved.

For Abby, there was already something different about the little cinema before her family had anything to do with running it. She remembers seeing movies like “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Whale Rider” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” films she simply wasn’t finding elsewhere.

“Cinema takes you on a journey to places you don’t normally get to go. It shows you other worlds beyond your hometown,” Abby said.

The cinema stayed. (Thanks, Granny.)

Today, Midtown Cinema is owned by LIFT Development, led by partners John Tierney and Matt Tunnell. John and Abby Tierney have remained closely involved in the cinema and its evolution, investing repeatedly in both the building and the experience inside it.

Midtown Cinema circa 2014.

In 2013, under new management, Midtown entered another period of reinvention. The theaters converted to digital projection, the building was updated and a membership program was introduced. Membership took off like wildfire.

At the same time, Midtown began exploring what else an independent neighborhood movie theater could be.

Alongside its first-run programming came repertory cinema and experiences built around the movies themselves. There were themed series, celebrations of filmmakers and actors, anime weekends and old favorites brought back to the big screen. There were post-screening discussions, filmmaker and author interviews, and programming celebrating LGBTQ, Asian American and Black film.

And there was a lot of chalk.

The cinema’s chalkboard walls became part of its personality, changing constantly with hand-drawn movie art, showtimes, quotes and whatever else the staff dreamed up.

Down in Front! put improvisors in front of the screen to riff live on the best of the worst. Third in the Burg Movie Night turned nostalgic and crowd-pleasing films into an unofficial after-party for Harrisburg’s monthly night out.

There were movie marathons, too. Star Trek. Marvel. The Muppets. Horror films.

For the Lord of the Rings marathon, the staff built a Hobbit hole and a local drag performer dressed as a sexy Ent. Sanderson sisters wandered the halls before “Hocus Pocus.” Michael Myers posed for photos at the premiere of the “Halloween” reboot. At an Oscar party, one guest transformed himself into a living Academy Award.

Filmmakers and artists became part of the experience, too. Greg Sestero, star of “The Room” and author of “The Disaster Artist,” has stopped by a few times over the years. Midtown’s longstanding relationship with Moviate has brought experimental and underground cinema to its screens, along with filmmakers and artists including Mike Kuchar and Crispin Glover. Countless local films have premiered on Reily Street through the work of local filmmaking groups Vidjam and CineSpark.

The lobby became a gathering place in its own right, with popular trivia and open mic nights on the cinema’s stage. Bands and solo artists play acoustic sets in the lobby. Patrons can grab a Zeroday beer, listen to music on the patio or take that beer inside to enjoy with the latest foreign release.

The worlds of film and theater occasionally overlapped, too. Open Stage staged Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Flick,” about the employees of a small movie theater transitioning from film to digital projection, inside Midtown Cinema itself. The Harrisburg Fringe Festival uses the cinema as a venue each July.

But special programming is only part of the puzzle.

Week after week, Midtown’s core remains new first-run independent films, documentaries and films from around the world. Everything else has grown around that foundation.

Some of it has even moved outside. Through a partnership with Friends of Midtown, summer movies have brought hundreds of people into the parking lot with blankets and lawn chairs. One screening of “Labyrinth” drew an estimated 700 people.

“We’re building on a legacy here,” said Lindsay Kirkwood, Midtown Cinema’s general manager. “Midtown Cinema has become a hub for arts, culture and community. We love bringing the movies to Harrisburg, and we’re thrilled to offer that third space experience to our friends and neighbors.”

That sense of community is also what John says makes him proudest of what Midtown has become. “Moviegoers travel hours, sometimes crossing state lines, because Midtown may be the closest theater showing a particular film,” he says. But the local relationship matters most.

Abby sees that relationship from another angle. Midtown feels like home, she said, but can offer a perspective that doesn’t feel like home at all. It can be a comfortable gathering place while taking you somewhere unfamiliar.

Midtown Cinema’s evolution happened alongside the neighborhood itself. Since the cinema opened in 2001, arts organizations, restaurants, businesses and gathering places have increasingly filled in around it.

The cinema changed physically, too.

A major renovation was just getting underway in 2020 when the pandemic hit. The old theater seats had already been removed, but with traditional moviegoing suddenly impossible, Midtown pivoted again. Before installing the new seats, the theaters were filled with thrifted couches and chairs and offered for private screenings, allowing families and small groups to safely have a movie theater to themselves.

For several months, going to Midtown meant settling onto a secondhand sofa with the people in your bubble and watching a movie on the big screen.

The renovation ultimately reimagined the lobby and exterior, added new seating and expanded concessions. Zeroday Brewing Company opened an outpost in the lobby, creating another reason for people to stay before and after a movie.

Then came another plot twist.

In August 2024, water associated with Hurricane Debby caused significant damage and forced Midtown to close for roughly two months. The interruption became another opportunity to rethink the space.

Midtown reopened that October with a new lobby stage, expanded gathering space, improved soundproofing between theaters, a consolidated concessions area and a permanent red carpet.

At the reopening, the message to the crowd was simple:

“Welcome home.”

Kirkwood now oversees a cinema that has accumulated 25 years of history without becoming a museum to itself.

“Our goal now is to continue growing and expanding our circle while keeping the focus on providing the best possible guest experience,” she said. “We’re so fortunate to have a talented, engaged and truly fun team that makes this all possible.”

This year, Midtown has been looking backward as well as forward.

Its 25 for 25 series has presented one movie representing each year the cinema has been open, from 2001 through 2025, with ticket prices discounted to approximately what moviegoers paid in the year each featured film was originally released.

In September, the series circles back to the beginning with “Amélie,” representing 2001.

The rest of the month looks almost like a compressed history of what Midtown has become. There is a late-night screening of “They Live.” Down in Front! riffs on “Hercules vs. the Moon Men.” Friends of Midtown presents “The NeverEnding Story” outdoors. “School of Rock” gets the Third in the Burg treatment. National Theatre Live shares the calendar with new independent films.

Then, on Sept. 25, Midtown celebrates a milestone.

The 25th anniversary will be a free Barbenheimer-themed birthday party, bringing together many of the things that have accumulated around those original three screens: music, entertainment, games, cake and, of course, movies.

“Oppenheimer” plays inside. “Barbie” plays outside.

Twenty-five years after Granny Andrews helped make sure the cinema stayed open, there are still ways to help keep it that way.

John’s answer is uncomplicated: come to the movies. Buy some popcorn. Become a member. Tell your friends and neighbors.

Abby adds another: tune in.

Sign up for Midtown’s weekly email. Follow along on social media. She often hears from people asking whether Midtown might be showing a particular film, only to have to tell them it already played. “With only three screens, movies can come and go pretty quickly,” she says.

And there are always more movies coming.

Perhaps that is the simplest explanation for how a tiny arthouse survived a quarter century of changes in technology, neighborhoods, audiences and the way people watch movies.

It kept changing without abandoning the thing it was built to do.

On Sept. 25, lawn chairs will begin appearing in the parking lot. The sky will get dark. A projector will come on.

Some people there will have been coming to Midtown Cinema for decades. Others may be there for the first time.

Nearly twenty-five years after its first audiences took their seats, Midtown Cinema will do what it has always done.

The lights will dim, the screen will come alive, and Harrisburg will watch a movie together.

Stuart Landon serves as director of community engagement at Midtown Cinema.