On Thursday, October 15, a crowd will gather on the front lawn of Olive Branch City Hall at 9200 Pigeon Roost Road, spread out blankets and folding chairs, and watch a vampire try to keep his daughter from falling in love with a human. The movie is Hotel Transylvania, the 2012 animated comedy, and the occasion is part of Movies Under the Stars, the city's free, family-friendly outdoor film series that runs every Thursday night in October.
The screening is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Domino's Olive Branch will be set up on the grounds, giving families time to eat and claim a spot before the projector rolls. There is no admission charge. The city's own event listing puts it plainly: "Join us each Thursday night at 7 pm, during the month of October, for a FREE family-friendly movie."
The 2026 lineup is built almost entirely around Halloween-adjacent titles. The series opened October 1 with Monsters, Inc., followed with Casper on October 8, and continues with Hotel Transylvania on October 15. Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is set for October 22, and the run closes October 29 with Goosebumps paired with a Community Trunk or Treat Night. Domino's Olive Branch is on site each night, and the city promises "other community pop ups too."
Hotel Transylvania fits the series' mood well. Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the animator behind Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, it was released by Sony Pictures in September 2012 with Adam Sandler voicing Count Dracula, Selena Gomez as his daughter Mavis, and a supporting cast that includes Andy Samberg, Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, David Spade, and CeeLo Green. The premise is a twist on the classic monster-movie setup: Dracula has built a lavish resort hidden from humans, where monsters can vacation without being hunted, and the plot turns on a human backpacker stumbling into the hotel on Mavis's 118th birthday. The film runs 91 minutes and became a durable franchise starter, grossing roughly $358 million worldwide against an $85 million budget.
What makes the setting notable is the venue itself. Olive Branch City Hall is not just an administrative building; it is a civic landmark on a campus that also houses a small one-room museum with a dozen cases of local artifacts. The lawn in front of it has become the city's de facto gathering space for this kind of low-key community programming.
Olive Branch has a long history of being a crossroads. The community was originally called Watson's Crossroad, founded near the point where several old Chickasaw trails met. When the first post office was established in 1846, Frances Wilson Blocker, a descendant of one of the area's founding families, suggested the name Olive Branch, seeing in it the dove that returned to Noah carrying a branch. The town was incorporated on May 1, 1874, and became a village on March 6, 1888. Among the earliest settlers were Stephen Flinn and his brother-in-law Milton Blocker, who bought sections of DeSoto County from Chickasaw Chief Lush-pum-tubby for $1,600; Blocker is credited with the village's first business, a mule-powered cotton gin. A creamery and a boat factory later helped carry the local economy.
That small agricultural settlement has since become something else entirely. Olive Branch is now the fastest-growing city in Mississippi, according to an analysis by GOBankingRates that examined eight years of U.S. Census American Community Survey data. The city grew by nearly a third, about 32.9 percent, between 2015 and 2023, reaching roughly 46,500 residents, with per capita income rising about 46.7 percent over the same period. It sits about half an hour from downtown Memphis, and its median household income, per the U.S. Census Bureau, is $98,421.
For a city in that kind of growth spurt, a free movie on the lawn is a modest thing. But it is also the sort of event that a rapidly expanding suburb needs: something that costs nothing, requires no planning, and puts neighbors on the same patch of grass for an evening. The series runs weekly through the end of October, and the Hotel Transylvania night lands on a Thursday, which means the weekend starts a day early for anyone who shows up with a chair.
Details are straightforward. The movie starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 15, 2026, on the front lawn of Olive Branch City Hall, 9200 Pigeon Roost Road. Food vendors open at 6 p.m. Admission is free and open to all.