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There are a variety of movie theatres:
Some movie theaters are converted from conventional theaters, and some theaters may be temporarily converted to show movies. As for content, some theatres have special series devoted to art and foreign films shown on a limited basis, and sometimes a higher ticket to appeal to an audience that sometimes does not have a dedicated venue for such fare.
Some movie theaters are outdoors and so can only be used when it is dark. A drive-in movie theater is basically a parking area with a screen at one end and a projection booth at the other. Moviegoers drive into the parking spaces which are usually provided with portable loudspeakers or the vehicle's sound system tunes to an FM station over which the soundtrack is played, and the movie is viewed through the car windscreen. Drive-in movies were mainly found in the United States, and were especially popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but are now almost extinct.
Some outdoor movie theaters are just cleared areas where the audience sits upon chairs or blankets and watch the movie on a temorary screen, or even the wall of a convenient building.
In late 1990s student organisations in universities and schools started to show movies in auditoriums equipped with multimedia projectors.
Some alternative methods of showing movies have been popular in the past. In 1980s the introduction of VHS casettes made possible video-salons, small rooms where visitors viewed the film on a large TV. These establishments were especially popular in the Soviet Union, where official distribution companies were slow to adapt to changing demand and so movie theaters could not show popular Hollywood and Asian films.
According to motion picture rating systems, children or teenagers below a certain age may be forbidden access to theaters showing certain movies, or simply subject to parental guidance.
As movie theaters have grown into multiplexes and megaplexes, crowd control has become a major concern. An overcrowded megaplex can be rather unpleasant (due to factors like body odor and bruising), and in an emergency can be extremely dangerous. Therefore, all major theater chains have implemented crowd control measures.
The most famous one is the ubiquitous holdout line which prevents ticketholders for the next showing of that weekend's most popular movie from entering the building until their particular auditorium has been cleared out and cleaned. Furthermore, many theater chains like to co-locate their theaters in shopping centers, and they deliberately build lobbies and corridors that are too small, making holdout lines a necessity. In turn, ticketholders will hopefully be enticed to shop or eat while stuck in the holdout line.