Frodo, Sam, and the rest of the Fellowship are taking over one of Downtown Los Angeles's grandest old movie palaces for Labor Day weekend, as Secret Movie Club screens all three Lord of the Rings films back-to-back on 35mm film inside the Los Angeles Theatre. The full-day marathon kicks off with The Fellowship of the Ring at 10 a.m., moves into The Two Towers at 2 p.m., and closes with The Return of the King at 6 p.m., giving fans a chance to watch Peter Jackson's Oscar-sweeping trilogy the way it was originally shown in theaters.
The event, first detailed by the Los Angeles Daily News, marks the marathon's move from its previous home at the Million Dollar Theater to the Los Angeles Theatre at 615 S. Broadway. The venue swap is notable on its own: the Million Dollar Theater, which opened in February 1918 as Sid Grauman's first Los Angeles movie palace, has frequently hosted Secret Movie Club screenings, according to Los Angeles Theatres. This time, organizers are trading one historic Broadway landmark for another.
According to the Daily News report, the day is structured as a genuine endurance test for Tolkien devotees. The Fellowship of the Ring runs 2 hours and 58 minutes, The Two Towers clocks in at 2 hours and 59 minutes, and The Return of the King stretches to 3 hours and 21 minutes, with one-hour intermissions built in between each screening. Backstage tours, live music, a food court, and beverages round out the day, and the marathon wraps with a 21-and-over There and Back Again afterparty starting at 10 p.m.
A Rare Chance Inside a French Baroque Landmark
Hosting an all-day cinema marathon at the Los Angeles Theatre is unusual in itself. The venue, designed by architect S. Charles Lee in an opulent French Baroque style modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, features a 2,000-seat auditorium and a main lobby with a 50-foot ceiling and crystal chandeliers, per Discover Los Angeles. It opened on January 30, 1931, with the premiere of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, an event attended by guest of honor Albert Einstein after Chaplin reportedly helped fund the theater's final construction to keep it on schedule.
At its 1931 debut, the theater boasted amenities that were cutting-edge for the era, including an electric seat-monitoring system for ushers, soundproof crying rooms for parents with infants, and a periscope-and-prism optical system that projected films down into basement lounges, Discover Los Angeles notes. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in May 1979 and designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 225 later that August, cementing its protected status within the city's Broadway Theatre District, a six-block corridor holding 12 historic movie palaces built between 1910 and 1931. That stretch represents the highest concentration of pre-WWII cinemas anywhere in the country, per the same source.
A Trilogy With Oscar Pedigree
The films being screened need little introduction to genre fans. The Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters in 2001, The Two Towers followed in 2002, and The Return of the King closed out the trilogy in 2003. That final chapter went on to sweep all 11 Academy Awards for which it was nominated at the 76th Oscars in February 2004, tying Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most wins in Oscar history, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Combined, the three theatrical cuts run 558 minutes, or roughly 9 hours and 18 minutes, not counting intermissions or afterparty festivities.
Secret Movie Club, the organization behind the marathon, was founded in April 2016 by film programmer Craig Hammill, who launched the group with a 35mm midnight screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Vista Theatre in Los Feliz, according to Bold Journey Magazine. The group has a track record with this particular trilogy locally: back in November 2018, it hosted a midnight 35mm screening of The Two Towers at the Vista, an event Hoodline covered at the time in a roundup of cheap LA outings. The marathon format has also traveled beyond Los Angeles, with Hoodline reporting on a similar extended-cut trilogy screening at Phoenix's Harkins Theatres in January 2024.
Tickets and Fine Print
Individual film tickets are priced at $17 each, while a triple-feature ticket covering all three movies costs $45. Fans wanting the full experience, including the afterparty, can buy an entire-day ticket for $65, with all passes available through the Secret Movie Club website. Organizers have noted that showtimes could shift because of a technical glitch, so ticket holders may want to confirm scheduling before heading downtown for the holiday weekend event.
