Read all the posts above - there is a lot of talk about glowsticks...

thanks for the tip on the glowsticks.. good idea! Are the ones from Oriental Trading reliable and good? I know the ones at the dollar stores never seem to work.. anyone have any recommendations for good glowsticks?

Just wanted to follow up on our outdoor night last weekend.
THANK YOU to everyone here!
We ended up not doing "real" food because in our attempt to do "preorders", less than 10 replied. We sold throughout the whole movie due to sheer demand!

However, with our own popcorn machine and the tips on nachos from Sam's, we made out ok! Remembering that this was a "fun"draiser and our first ever, in our school of 330 students, having ~ 300 people show up was fabulous! We only charged .50 for popcorn & soda, and $1 for nachos & candy and ended up with a couple of hundred profit, with leftover food for the next event.

The glow necklaces & bracelets were the absolute BEST!!! They kept the 'wandering' kids busy, playing catch with each other in the dark, in addition to making all the kids happy overall. At $1/ea we sold over a hundred, covered our costs and still have another several hundred left.

The only thing I would change is the size of our screen, but I think I have the solution to that:
backyardtheater.com/

Do most folks sell throughout the movie or stop a bit after the movie starts?

We have done one movie night and it was fun! We didn't have tickets just RSVP-on the flyer we sent home they were "suppose" to tear off and send in. We did have about 20% no shows and 15% that didn't RSVP so it worked out. We served hot dogs, then w/sauce, pizza (we have a pizza place about a 1/2 mile done the road and order 10 pizzas at a time, then sell popcorn (we have a popper), movie candy and the only thing we sold to drink was water. On the food we bought perfect ran out about 30 minutes before the movie was over. Water I bought WAY to much, we used for later. We served all night long, it was amazing how much food was sold.

We are getting ready to hold our second one, We are playing older movies Santa Claus 2--since the 3rd one is getting ready to come out.

We played an older one for our first one. We let the children pick that one. We picked this one.

Good Luck to you all, We are excited to have our second one. This one will be in the fall, our first one was in the spring.

We will see how the difference is.

Congrats! It's always fun to read about successes