Students do a roaring trade in ticket sales as Lion King cinema event sells out

Enterprising students from the University of Northampton have masterminded a cinema spectacular which promises to be a roaring success.

The five Events Management undergraduates have organised an open-air cinema screening of Disney’s The Lion King as their main final-year project.

All 500 tickets for the Cinema Under the Stars event, which takes place at Brixworth Country Park on Saturday 13 May, were snapped up in a matter of a weeks – with the organisers convinced they could have easily sold twice as many.

Letisha Swamy, Lucy Barwell, Dominique Dorsett-Vidal, Abigail Mackenzie and Lauren Sheppard are organising the family film screening to raise money for Northampton homeless charity, the Hope Centre.

But while they’ve found the marketing of the event a doddle, there’s been a mountain of regulations and red tape to cut through to stage a public performance.

“Marketing was very straightforward,” said Letisha. “We mainly relied on social media to spread the word, targeting a Brixworth community page on Facebook, for example, and the sales just took off – our 50 early bird tickets sold out within just four days.”

Abigail added: “What’s been really hard work has been arranging all of the licences and paperwork to stage a public event.

“There’s catering licences, health and safety to consider, child protection guidelines, a licence to broadcast the film, environmental health rules and we’ve even had to be in touch with the police and fire service. People might think holding an event in a field would be easy to organise, but there’s so much hard work involved behind the scenes.”

The students have booked an open-air cinema company to screen the film and organised a variety of attractions to ensure it’s a fun-filled evening, including a bouncy castle, catering, face painting, a balloon artist and live music.

While the event is sold out, you can still support the Hope Centre via the students’ JustGiving page.

You can also follow Cinema Under the Stars updates on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.