hOwTo

movies.json

A plain, stable JSON feed of everything currently playing on stuffsac — built for your own tool or bot to read, not just a browser.

It's rebuilt every time the site itself is (once a day), straight from the same database that drives the site, the RSS feed, and the calendar subscriptions. Nothing in it is computed separately from what the site shows — if a movie or showtime isn't on stuffsac, it isn't in here either.

Where to find it

Every page on the site has its own movies.json sitting right alongside it, scoped to exactly what that page shows:

https://www.stuffsac.com/movies.json — everything, across every region
https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/movies.json — one region (also /gold-country/, /santa-cruz/, /san-francisco/)
https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/tower/movies.json — one theater
https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/tower/series/musical-mondays/movies.json — one series, at the one theater that runs it
https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/tower/series/movies.json — every series at one theater
https://www.stuffsac.com/santa-cruz/series/the-met-live-in-hd/movies.json — one series, across every theater that runs it
https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/film/movies.json — a whole region, narrowed to one attribute (also /imax/, /series/)

If you can load a page on the site, you can load its movies.json — same URL, just add movies.json after the trailing slash.

See all 117 endpoints

Shape

The response is a JSON array of Movie objects — no wrapper object, no pagination, no envelope.

Movie

Field	Type	Notes
name	string	The site's own resolved title — TMDB's own spelling when there's a confident match, otherwise whichever theater's own wording was seen first.
description	string \| null	TMDB's own synopsis when matched, otherwise the first theater's own words.
release_year	string \| null	The film's own real release year, e.g. `"2025"` — from TMDB when matched, otherwise parsed from the theater's own listing when it includes one. Not the year of any particular screening.
runtime_minutes	number \| null	From TMDB, when matched — no theater's own page is scraped for runtime.
poster_url	string \| null	TMDB's own poster when matched and available, otherwise whatever image the theater's own page had.
trailer_url	string \| null	A full, playable YouTube URL.
tmdb_id	number \| null	The Movie Database's own id, when matched.
tmdb_rating	number \| null	TMDB's own vote average (0–10), not a stuffsac editorial rating.
tmdb_url	string \| null	That movie's own page on themoviedb.org.
url	string	This movie's own card on stuffsac, on the same page this `movies.json` belongs to — not any one theater's ticket page (a movie playing at several theaters has no single "the" outbound link).
showings	Showing[]	One entry per theater currently playing it.

Showing

Field	Type	Notes
name	string	This theater's own spelling of the title, verbatim — never overwritten by a confident TMDB match the way the Movie's own `name` above can be, so it can differ from it (e.g. different capitalization/punctuation).
description	string \| null	This theater's own synopsis text, verbatim — never TMDB's, the way the Movie's own `description` above can be.
auditorium	string \| null	Only set for a theater whose own page actually names a specific screen/room.
formats	string[]	The exact same badge text the site shows next to this showing, filtered to just the real projection-format tags, e.g. `"35mm"`, `"Laser"` — including a `"(N)"` count suffix (e.g. `"Laser (2)"`) whenever a run genuinely varies across its own showtimes, same as the site's own badge. Each showtime's own `formats` below carries that session's own plain tag with no count at all. Often empty.
quirks	string[]	Same badge text as `formats` above (count suffix included the same way), but everything that isn't a projection format instead: language/accessibility text (e.g. `"English Subtitles"`), `"Q&A"`, a theater-wide quirk like `"Outdoors"`. Often empty.
source_url	string	That theater's own info/ticket page for this run — not a page on stuffsac (contrast the Movie's own `url`).
region	Region	The region this showing's theater belongs to.
theater	Theater	The theater playing it.
series	Series \| null	Set when this booking belongs to a named series/signature program.
showtimes	Showtime[]	This booking's entire run, sorted chronologically — already-passed sessions included, same full schedule the site's own page shows, not just what's still upcoming.
first_seen_at	string	Full ISO 8601 — when this whole booking was first discovered, frozen from then on. Coarser than each showtime's own `first_seen_at` below, which is the only one of the three timestamps here that can catch a genuinely new date added to a listing that's already been running a while.
last_seen_at	string	Full ISO 8601 — when this listing was last confirmed present by a scrape. Bumps on every scrape regardless of whether anything new was found, so it only answers "is this theater's page still being read successfully," not "is anything new happening" — for that, see `first_seen_at` above or each showtime's own below.

Region

Field	Type	Notes
sacid	string	This region's own stable identity, e.g. `"sacramento"`, `"gold-country"`, `"santa-cruz"`, `"san-francisco"`.
name	string	Its display name, e.g. `"Sacramento"`.
url	string	This region's own page on stuffsac.

Theater

Field	Type	Notes
sacid	string	This theater's own stable, globally-unique identity (e.g. `"sacramento/tower"`) — use this, not `name`, to key a lookup.
name	string	The theater's full name, exactly as shown on the site (e.g. `"Tower Theater"`, `"Davis Varsity Theater"`).
short_name	string	Its short name, as the site's own filters and headings show it (e.g. `"Tower"`, `"Varsity"`).
color	string	The color the site gives this theater on the page this file sits beside, as a CSS hex color (e.g. `"#4d7c0f"`).
source_url	string	The theater's own homepage.
url	string	This theater's own page on stuffsac.

Series

Field	Type	Notes
sacid	string	This series' own stable, globally-unique identity (e.g. `"sacramento/tower:tower-classics"`, or `"santa-cruz:the-met-live-in-hd"` for one shared across a region's theaters) — lets you tell apart two independently-named series that happen to share a display name.
name	string	The series' own plain display name, e.g. `"Tower Classics"` or `"Hitchcocktober"`.
description	string \| null	Null when this series has a name but no page/write-up synced yet.
source_url	string \| null	The theater's own page for this series, when it has one.
film_description	string \| null	This series' own write-up of this showing's film, from the series page — separate from the showing's own `description`. Null when the series page has none for it.
url	string	This series' own page on stuffsac — the region-wide page (e.g. `/santa-cruz/series/the-met-live-in-hd/`) when it plays at more than one theater in its region, otherwise the page under its one theater (e.g. `/sacramento/tower/series/hitchcocktober/`).

Showtime

Field	Type	Notes
start_on	string	`YYYY-MM-DD`. Always set.
start_at	string \| null	Full ISO 8601, only when a specific start time could be resolved — don't assume it's ever populated; fall back to `start_on` alone.
formats	string[]	This specific session's own real projection-format tags, e.g. `"35mm"`, `"IMAX"`, `"Laser"`. Often empty.
quirks	string[]	This specific session's own quirks — everything that isn't a format, e.g. `"English Subtitles"`, `"Q&A"`. Often empty.
first_seen_at	string \| null	Full ISO 8601 — when this exact session was first discovered, frozen from then on (even once it's playing or past). Useful for telling a genuinely new showtime apart from one that's just still on the schedule. Null for a session scraped before this field existed.

Example

[
  {
    "name": "When Harry Met Sally",
    "description": "Sex always gets in the way of friendships between men and women. At least, that's what Harry Burns believes...",
    "release_year": "1989",
    "runtime_minutes": 96,
    "poster_url": "https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/rFOiFUhTMtDetqCGClC9PIgnC1P.jpg",
    "trailer_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQpG579MsQ4",
    "tmdb_id": 639,
    "tmdb_rating": 7.4,
    "tmdb_url": "https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/639",
    "url": "https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/#tmdb-639-when-harry-met-sally",
    "showings": [
      {
        "name": "When Harry Met Sally",
        "description": "One of the smartest romantic comedies ever written explores the question: \"Can men and women ever just be friends?\"...",
        "auditorium": null,
        "formats": [],
        "quirks": ["English Subtitles"],
        "source_url": "https://angelikafilmcenter.com/tower/movies/details/when-harry-met-sally",
        "region": {
          "sacid": "sacramento",
          "name": "Sacramento",
          "url": "https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/"
        },
        "theater": {
          "sacid": "sacramento/tower",
          "name": "Tower Theater",
          "short_name": "Tower",
          "color": "#4d7c0f",
          "source_url": "https://angelikafilmcenter.com/tower/",
          "url": "https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/tower/"
        },
        "series": {
          "sacid": "sacramento/tower:tower-classics",
          "name": "Tower Classics",
          "description": "Join us the fourth Monday of each month to relive these iconic flicks on the big screen!",
          "source_url": "https://angelikafilmcenter.com/tower/signature-programming/tower-classics",
          "url": "https://www.stuffsac.com/sacramento/tower/series/tower-classics/",
          "film_description": null
        },
        "showtimes": [
          { "start_on": "2026-12-28", "start_at": "2026-12-28T19:00:00", "formats": [], "quirks": ["English Subtitles"], "first_seen_at": "2026-10-01T09:14:02" }
        ],
        "first_seen_at": "2026-09-14T11:02:00",
        "last_seen_at": "2026-10-11T02:03:00"
      }
    ]
  }
]

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