Three Movies Still to Go: What’s Left of Mt. Juliet’s Free Summer Screenings at Charlie Daniels Park
There is a small, reliable pleasure in an outdoor movie that no living room can reproduce. Part of it is the screen glowing against a sky that has not quite finished going dark. Part of it is the sound carrying oddly across an open lawn. Most of it, honestly, is that everyone around you is also outside on a summer night with nowhere else to be.
Mt. Juliet Parks and Recreation has been running its Movie in the Park series at the Charlie Daniels Park amphitheater all season, and three screenings remain on the 2026 calendar. All of them are free.
What's left this year
- Friday, August 7 — Zootopia 2, 8:15 p.m.
- Friday, September 11 — Little Giants, 7:25 p.m.
- Friday, October 2 — Hook, 6:55 p.m.
Look at those times in order and you get a small astronomy lesson for free. Every movie starts at dusk, and dusk keeps moving. August's screening begins well after eight; by the October date, the projector fires up before seven. The season is quietly closing while you sit there.
The earlier entries in this year's run have already come and gone — Lilo & Stitch opened the series in June, and Field of Dreams followed in July, a film that plays a little differently on real grass in the dark than it does on a couch.
How to do it right
Bring a blanket or folding chairs; the amphitheater lawn is the seating. Concessions are available for purchase on site, so you can skip packing a cooler if you'd rather not. Bug spray is not officially on the list, but in a Middle Tennessee August it belongs there.
Arriving around sunset rather than at showtime is the local move. It gives you room to spread out on the slope, lets the kids run off some energy before anyone expects them to sit still, and means you are settled when the screen comes to life instead of picking your way across a field of occupied blankets.
A park with a name worth knowing
The venue itself carries a piece of Wilson County's musical history. Charlie Daniels made this area home for decades, and the park that bears his name has become the default gathering ground for exactly this kind of civic evening — the free, unfussy, show-up-with-a-blanket sort of event that a growing suburb has to work at keeping.
That is the real argument for a series like this. Mt. Juliet has added rooftops at a pace few Tennessee cities can match, and new neighborhoods do not automatically produce a community. Five nights a year when a few hundred people sit on the same hillside watching the same screen is a modest, cheap, remarkably effective way to make one.
If you're building out the rest of the family calendar, our roundup of family festivals and carnivals around Mt. Juliet and Wilson County covers what else is worth circling before the weather turns.
Three nights left. Then it's jacket season, and the projector goes back in the closet until June.
