This TED Talk features film producer Franklin Leonard recorded live at TEDx Venice Beach, 2017.

This weekend, tens of millions of people in the United States and tens of millions more around the world.

In Columbus, Georgia, in Cardiff, Wales, in Chongqing, China, in Chennai, India will leave their homes.

They'll get in their cars, or they'll take public transportation, or they will carry themselves

by foot, and they'll step into a room and sit down next to someone they don't know, or maybe

someone they do, and the lights will go down, and they'll watch a movie.

They'll watch movies about aliens or robots or robot aliens or regular people,

but they will all be movies about what it means to be human.

Millions will feel awe or fear.

Millions will laugh and millions will cry.

And then the lights will come back on,

and they'll reemerge into the world they knew several hours prior,

and millions of people will look at the world

a little bit differently than they did when they went in.

Like going to temple or a mosque or a church

or any other religious institution,

moviegoing is in many ways a sacred ritual,

repeated week after week after week.

I'll be there this weekend.

Just like I was on most weekends between the years of

1996 and 1990, at the multiplex near the shopping mall about five miles from my childhood

home in Columbus, Georgia. The funny thing is that somewhere between then and now, I accidentally

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