Akron's arthouse crowd is about to get its own dose of the most gloriously terrible movie ever made. Greg Sester o, who played Mark opposite writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau's Johnny in the notorious 2003 cult film “The Room,” is coming to The Nightlight Cinema for post-film Q&A sessions on Sunday, October 11.
The single-screen arthouse theater at 30 N. High St. in downtown Akron's historic arts district will screen “The Room” twice that day, at 3 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., with tickets priced at $20, according to Cleveland.com. Sestero is expected to appear after each showing to talk about the film with audiences, per the same report.
For anyone unfamiliar, “The Room” follows Johnny, a banker who seemingly has it all, whose fiancée Lisa carries on an affair with his supposed best friend Mark, played by Sestero. Wiseau wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Johnny, while Juliette Danielle played Lisa.
From Box Office Disaster to Midnight Movie Royalty
The film's path to cult status is one of the stranger stories in modern cinema. During its original two-week theatrical run at two Los Angeles theaters in June 2003, “The Room” grossed just $1,916 against an estimated $6 million production budget before being pulled from screens, according to Wikipedia. Wiseau independently financed the entire budget himself, claiming in a 2008 interview that he earned the money importing Korean leather jackets, per Collider.
Critics were not kind at the time. In a 2003 review, Variety wrote that “The Room” was a movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back — before even 30 minutes have passed. That savage assessment didn't stop the film from finding new life through word-of-mouth midnight screenings, eventually turning it into an international phenomenon.
Sestero's own path to the role was almost as chaotic as the production itself. He originally signed on to work behind the scenes as the film's line producer, only to be recast as Mark on the first day of shooting after Wiseau fired the actor originally hired for the part, according to Collider.
The Book, the Movie, and the Oscar Nod
Sestero went on to co-author the 2013 memoir “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made” with Tom Bissell, a New York Times bestseller that pulled back the curtain on the film's chaotic production and Wiseau's enigmatic background. The book was adapted into a 2017 feature film starring James Franco as Wiseau and Dave Franco as Sestero, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018. Wiseau and Sestero attended the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2017.
Fans planning to attend the Akron screenings should come prepared for the film's longstanding audience rituals, including the tradition of throwing plastic spoons at the screen whenever framed pictures of spoons appear in the set background — a habit that started because Wiseau never swapped out store-bought picture frames that came with generic spoon art already inside.
A Bigger Stage for Akron's Arthouse Cinema
The Nightlight Cinema is normally a single-screen arthouse movie theater, but it unveiled a second screening room in June 2025 that seats 71 people, doubling the venue's capacity following a $1 million capital campaign led by Executive Director Jenn Kidd. The expansion, detailed by the Cultural Plan, has left the nonprofit theater better equipped to host bigger community events and back-to-back screenings like the Sestero visit.
The theater was founded in July 2014 by University of Akron cinephiles as an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) movie house, growing out of the local film group Akron Film+Pixel before it opened its permanent space, according to Signal Akron. In June 2025, the Akron Community Foundation awarded the cinema a $17,000 operating support grant to help it reach its goal of serving 40,000 annual visitors, part of the foundation's quarterly arts and culture distribution to Summit County organizations.
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