From the earliest days when motion pictures replaced vaudeville as Americans’ primary entertainment experience right through cool evenings at the drive-in with the walkie-talkie like speaker hanging from the car window to the 3-D thunder of today’s blockbuster at the multiplex, movies have held a special place in our hearts and our imaginations.

Despite the migration to the individual screen on our laptops or tablets, we are not becoming a nation of nose-pressed-to-the-glass Netflix junkies. We like to get out. We like to come together over the shared experience of the cinema.

And if you are a boater, what could be better than combining the twin passions of the movies and boating. In short, nothing. It is the perfect combination, like hamburgers and fries, Abbott and Costello, Tracy and Hepburn. We don’t know the identity of the first person who thought of projecting a movie on huge floating screen on the water, but we know they were a genius.

The combination has it all. A community of boaters coming together to be entertained in the great outdoors with the waves lapping the boats, the excited squeals and hushed voices of the children, and the flickering images of Hollywood projected across water and night sky.

You will find plenty of boat-in movie nights at MarineMax locations across the country. The popularity just continues to grow because it taps into those wonderful impressions we all have in our collective brains of favorite movies seen in the company of favorite people.