General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Matinee

Matinee is a 1993 American comedy-drama directed by Joe Dante, in which a gimmick-loving B-movie producer brings his radioactive monster film Mant! to Key West, Florida, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. John Goodman stars as producer Lawrence Woolsey, a character modeled on the real-life showman William Castle, alongside Cathy Moriarty and Simon Fenton.¹^•² Universal Pictures released the film in the United States on January 29, 1993.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Joe Dante; screenplay by Charlie Haas, story by Haas and Jerico (Stone)²
Setting	Key West, Florida, October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis¹
Film within the film	Mant! ("Half man! Half ant! All terror!"), about a man who mutates into an ant³
Release	January 29, 1993 (US), Universal Pictures; PG rating²
Runtime	99 minutes by most listings; the AFI Catalog records 107 minutes⁴^•²
Box office	$9,532,895 domestic per Box Office Mojo; The Numbers reports $8,925,775⁵^•⁶
Critical reception	93% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (41 fresh, 3 rotten of 44 reviews); 63% audience Popcornmeter⁴

Spoilers

Premise

The story follows Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a fifteen-year-old navy dependent newly arrived in Key West, whose father is posted aboard a ship in the blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis.⁷^•⁸ Gene, a monster-movie fan, awaits the arrival of Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), an exploitation filmmaker who comes to town to premiere Mant!, a low-budget production about a man who mutates into an ant.¹ Woolsey, aided by his leading lady Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarty), decides that the prevailing fear of actual nuclear war is the perfect atmosphere in which to promote his fictional atomic horror.⁴

For the premiere, Woolsey deploys the kind of theatrical gimmicks popularized in the 1950s: theater seats wired with electric joy buzzers, dry-ice vapors blown at the audience, and an actor in a giant ant suit running through the aisles.⁹ His newest gimmick for the Saturday afternoon opening is called "Rumble-Rama."¹⁰ Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic, noted that these techniques were actually used in the 1950s, often by William Castle, who once let audiences choose between two endings of the same horror film.⁹

Production

The project began as a screenplay by Jerico Stone, developed originally at Warner Bros. and described by Dante as a "fantasy" about nostalgic friends gathering at a haunted neighborhood theater; Warner Bros. and several other studios passed on it.¹¹ Writer Charlie Haas, who had worked with Dante on Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), was hired for revisions, and Dante told the Los Angeles Times in September 1992 that only one page of Stone's first draft remained after the rewrites.¹² Stone later litigated unsuccessfully against the Writers Guild for screenplay credit, and shares on-screen story credit billed simply as "Jerico."¹¹

A 1991 Daily Variety article listed Matinee at a budget of $13 million, to be funded by the European investment company Falcon Film Finance Ltd.; the film then went into turnaround at Warner Bros. before moving to Universal Pictures, where Dante had signed a two-year first-look production deal.² A separate listing gives the production budget as US$14,000,000.¹³ Principal photography began on April 13, 1992. Most interior scenes were shot on two sound stages at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando, including a 10,000-square-foot recreation of the Strand Theatre; because of heavy tourism at the actual Strand location, the Cocoa Village Playhouse doubled as the theater's exterior.¹⁴

The crew included cinematographer John Hora, editor Marshall Harvey, production designer Steven Legler, and composer Jerry Goldsmith.² The cast features Dante's regular company of character actors, including Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Kevin McCarthy, and William Schallert.¹ Dante had cast Miller, a Roger Corman stock actor, in every one of his films to that point; in Matinee Miller plays Herb Denning, one of the local men protesting the monster movie's release.¹⁵ Naomi Watts appears in an early role as a "shopping cart starlet."⁶

Themes and reception

The film connects Cold War nuclear anxiety to the popularity of apocalyptic science-fiction pictures in the 1950s and early 1960s, showing how the most successful genre films worked by preying on their audiences' real fears, from Soviet satellite launches to atomic mutation.¹⁶ The New Yorker's 1993 review observed that the film makes this connection explicit, with the trailer for Mant! following an atomic-bomb explosion with a solemn, absurdly perfunctory "scientific" lecture by Woolsey.¹⁷ Ebert called it "a delightful comedy and one of the most charming movies in a long time," rating it three and a half of four stars, and read the film as marking the moment when the innocence of 1950s monster movies ended.⁹^•¹⁸ Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus describes it as "smart, funny, and disarmingly sweet."

Commercial performance. The film opened in sixth place in its first week, a result Cinema Retro attributes to Universal's blanket nationwide release of a film Dante had intended for limited art-house engagement.¹¹ Box Office Mojo records a domestic gross of $9,532,895 on a $3,601,015 opening weekend from 1,143 theaters, with no international release; The Numbers reports the domestic total as $8,925,775.⁵^•⁶ In Spain, where the film was released on December 1, 1993, it earned €274,019.79 from 99,090 admissions.¹⁹

Later reputation

The film has been periodically rediscovered. In 2010 the Wexner Center for the Arts screened it with Dante in person, describing it as "perhaps the film he was born to make"; in 2023 Laemmle Theatres held a 30th-anniversary screening with Dante present.¹^•¹⁰ The film-within-the-film, Mant!, survives in a rare expanded version that has been shown at special screenings.¹ In France, where the film was released on July 28, 1993 under the title Panic sur Florida Beach, contemporary critics read it as a confession by the generation of American directors formed by cinema itself rather than by life.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Comedy horror films › 20th-century comedy horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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