"What's Playing?" A Look at Michigan Theater Marquees, 1900-2000

Unless you visit or drive-thru one of Michigan's small towns or the old sections of a city, you may not see what old movie theater marquees were like.

Modern movie theatre marquees are.....well.....boring. Many of them slap a flat slab on the side of the building and list eight or ten different movies and you wind up standing there like an idiot trying to read them all....or reading them from your car and blocking traffic.

Other theaters are set back a good distance and have the marquee sitting alongside the road...and we're supposed to read all these titles while we're driving? Don't think so.

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Nowadays, most people rely on the internet to find what movies are playing and marquees are just an afterthought.

The old classic movie houses had two marquees: one would be a tall, stories-high vertical sign that had the name of the theater, and the other was either a rectangle, square, or triangle that wrapped around the outside of the entrance, complete with bright lights. And instead of eight or ten titles, it was just one – and sometimes two if they were showing a double feature.

Some were grand, some were bland.

So now, the question: what were some of the movies Michiganders were enjoying all those decades ago? Not all the feature films were blockbusters. Some were B-movies with unrecognizable titles. Some of the titles seen on the marquees in the gallery below are some I definitely never heard of...

Now take a look and see what movies were playing throughout Michigan all those years ago!