The 2025 edition of the annual Grateful Dead ‘Meet-Up At The Movies’ will take place on August 14th, 2025 with a special screening of The Grateful Dead Movie in cinemas and IMAX theaters around the country. In celebration of the Dead’s 60th anniversary, the band will show a version of the 1977 concert film with additional bonus footage.
This year’s ‘Meet-Up At The Movies’ will be the first to include screenings at IMAX theaters. Advanced IMAX previews will screen at 60 immersive theaters across North America on August 13th ahead of the wide theatrical release in theaters throughout the U.S. and select territories. This will be the first time The Grateful Dead Movie has ever been shown on IMAX screens, featuring lovingly restored footage adapted for a larger-than-life viewing experience. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux said in a statement that the IMAX showing was “the greatest screening I’ve ever experienced of a film I’ve seen hundreds of times.”
The 2025 ‘Meet-Up At The Movies’ will also signal The Grateful Dead Movie‘s first trip back to theaters in eight years. For this year’s showing, fans are encouraged to stay behind after the original cut for the exclusive theatrical premiere of “China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider”. The additional coverage comes from the same October 1974 run at San Francisco’s Winterland Arena documented in The Grateful Dead Movie. The five-night residency marked the Dead’s final shows before a hiatus of then-undetermined length, with the final evening ominously billed as “The Last One.”
Co-directed by Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead Movie remains a groundbreaking milestone in the development of the concert film genre. Arriving less than a decade after D.A. Pennebaker‘s Monterey Pop and Michael Wadleigh‘s iconic Woodstock, The Grateful Dead Movie turned the cameras from the stage to the crowd, becoming the first major documentation of the Deadhead subculture that had organically grown around the band. Opening with seven-minutes of animation that was at the time state-of-the-art (costing as much as the rest of the two-plus-hour film) and has since become wonderfully dated, The Grateful Dead Movie goes beyond Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux, and the return of Mickey Hart to authentically capture the Grateful Dead ethos and community.
“As Jerry had known all along, it captured and defined our identity,” Kreutzmann wrote in his 2015 memoir, “since it had the visual element to go along with the music, the animation to go along with the interviews, and the B-roll that really showed viewers with their own eyes the circus that was a Grateful Dead show in San Francisco circa 1974.”
Tickets for the 2025 Grateful Dead “Meet-Up At The Movies” featuring The Grateful Dead Movie will go on sale on Thursday, June 26th at 9:00 a.m. ET here. For the first time, Trafalgar Releasing will issue “Meet-Up At The Movies” merchandise, including hoodies, t-shirts, hats, and totes.
If you’re jonesing to watch more live music ahead of the Meet-Up you’re in luck: From now through June 29th, new users can subscribe to nugs All Access for just $5 per month for four months, as opposed to the usual $19.99 monthly rate. That gives you four months of prime summer tour and festival livestreams for just $20. View the upcoming nugs livestream schedule and get started streaming here. [Editor’s note: Live For Live Music is a nugs affiliate. Ordering your subscription or purchasing a download via the links on the page helps support our work covering the world of live music. Thanks for reading!]
