Twenty years after “Forrest Gump” turned Mobile into a household name across the globe, the movie is heading back to the big screen in a newly remastered IMAX format — but not in the city where its story is set. That has the film’s Point Clear-based author, Winston Groom, shaking his head.
Paramount is bringing “Forrest Gump: The IMAX Experience” to theaters for a one-week run beginning September 5, marking two decades since the Tom Hanks film swept six Academy Awards and became one of the highest-grossing movies ever made. The anniversary reissue gives audiences a chance to see the film as never before — digitally remastered, scaled up to IMAX proportions and restored to the big screen in an era when most anniversary viewings happen on living-room televisions.
For Gulf Coast residents hoping to catch the anniversary release close to home, the nearest options will be an AMC screen in Montgomery or a theater in Destin, Florida. Neither requires more than a few hours’ drive, but both require leaving the region — a reality that stings for fans of a film whose famous bench sat in the heart of Mobile’s historic district and whose narrator’s worldview was formed on the Gulf Coast.
Mobile’s only IMAX screen, the J.L. Bedsole IMAX Dome Theater at the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, will sit this one out. The omission is not a slight but a matter of engineering, as the museum’s staff explains — and it leaves the birthplace of the Gump story without a screen capable of showing it in the format Paramount has built for the occasion.
Why the Exploreum’s dome can’t show it
Exploreum staff say the dome-style projection used at the museum isn’t compatible with the standard IMAX format used for the rerelease, and retrofitting the equipment to handle feature-length films would mean a costly upgrade running into tens of thousands of dollars.
The distinction between dome IMAX and standard IMAX is more than technical trivia. The Bedsole theater wraps its audience in a curved, tilted dome, projecting science documentaries — undersea journeys, space flights, natural wonders — across nearly the entire hemisphere of vision. That format excels at the immersive, short-form educational films the Exploreum runs on a continuous schedule. A Hollywood feature mastered for flat, standard IMAX screens simply has no native way to fill that dome, and reverse-engineering the presentation would demand new projection hardware and sound systems far beyond the museum’s equipment budget.
The theater’s shorter show format and its focus on educational, all-ages programming also make Hollywood features a poor fit, according to the museum’s marketing team. The Exploreum’s schedule is built around school groups and family visits, with multiple daily showings of documentaries whose runtimes fit classroom field trips. A two-hour-plus feature would break the rhythm that keeps the dome booked from morning to closing.
Those reasons add up to a business case the museum can defend, but they leave a cultural gap. For two weeks in September, the film that put Mobile on the world’s movie map will play everywhere in the region except the place that inspired it.
Groom: practical reasons, hard timing
Groom, who still calls the Mobile Bay area home, said he understands the practical reasons but still finds the timing tough to swallow. Two decades after the release, the anniversary is precisely the moment a hometown rewatch seems called for — and the absence of a local screen gives the milestone an ironic edge.
He recalled watching the film for the first time at a hometown screening in 1994, packed with friends and Mobile’s mayor at the time. That first night was a celebration of a book that had grown into a phenomenon no one quite expected — a novel by a Mobile Bay-area writer, adapted into a film that would win Best Picture and cement lines like “Life is like a box of chocolates” into the world’s vocabulary.
Decades later, he says, the story remains inseparable from its setting — and locals, he argues, ought to have a chance to see the anniversary cut on a big screen without leaving the region. Gump’s journey runs through the Alabama landscape of Groom’s imagination, from Greenbow’s small-town rhythms to the shrimp boats of the Gulf, and the author’s point is simple: the audience that lives inside that landscape deserves the anniversary screening most of all.
Fairhope’s celebration: an evening with the author
Fairhope will get its own moment with the milestone regardless. Bookseller Karin Wilson of Page & Palette is hosting “An Evening with Winston Groom” on September 26 at The Venue in downtown Fairhope, featuring a shrimp boil, a live set from the band Cornbread performing music from the film’s soundtrack, and an on-stage conversation between Groom and longtime friend Jimbo Meador.
The event stacks the elements of a proper Eastern Shore celebration: the seafood that Gump’s fictional shrimping career made famous, the music that carried the film’s story, and the author himself in conversation with a friend who knew the real-life characters and places behind the book. Tickets include a signed, commemorative hardcover edition of the novel, giving attendees a keepsake of an anniversary that Hollywood is marking everywhere but Mobile.
Page & Palette has long been the literary heart of Fairhope, a town whose bookstore-and-porch culture suits an author event of this scale. The choice of The Venue downtown signals the scope of the evening — a full production rather than a signing table — and the shrimp boil nods to the film’s most beloved plotline, Gump and Bubba’s dream of the shrimping business.
For Baldwin County, the evening doubles as a showcase of the region’s cultural infrastructure. A locally owned bookstore, a hometown band, a downtown venue and a beloved local author together staged the kind of celebration that the anniversary deserves — proof that the movie’s hometown spirit lives on the Eastern Shore whether or not an IMAX projector is available across the bay.
Twenty years of Gump on the Gulf Coast
The film’s relationship with Mobile has always been a peculiar mixture of pride and fiction. The movie was filmed largely in the Carolinas and elsewhere, but its identity is unmistakably Alabama — the small town of Greenbow, the All-American football career, the shrimping waters of the Gulf, and the bench in Chippewa Square that sent every frame of the story into the world. Mobile’s Gump claims run deep: the novel’s author lives at Point Clear, the city’s landmarks appear in the book’s imagination, and for two decades the region has embraced the story as its own.
The movie’s achievements remain staggering to recount. Six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Robert Zemeckis and Best Actor for Tom Hanks. One of the highest-grossing films ever made at the time of its release. A soundtrack that became a cultural document of American music. Lines of dialogue that entered everyday speech and stayed. And a running figure in a white suit, box of chocolates in hand, who became one of the most recognizable images in modern cinema.
The IMAX reissue capitalizes on all of that. Remastering a 1994 film for modern giant screens involves digital cleanup, color restoration and sound remixing that make the material feel contemporary, and Paramount’s one-week window is designed to convert nostalgia into ticket sales efficiently — a limited run, an event feel, and audiences who want the big-screen experience before it disappears again.
Where the hometown celebration lives
For a story that put Mobile on the map for millions of moviegoers worldwide, the anniversary is turning into a reminder that Baldwin County’s literary and cultural scene, rather than a movie screen, may be where the hometown celebration really happens this year.
That outcome suits the region’s character. The Gulf Coast’s claim on Gump was never really about theaters — it was about the landscape, the shrimping culture, the storytelling tradition and the author who turned all of it into a novel. Montgomery’s AMC and Destin’s multiplex will show the remastered film to their audiences; Fairhope’s shrimp boil and stage conversation will give the region something no remaster can, an evening with the man who wrote it.
The practical gap remains for film fans who want the full IMAX experience without a road trip, and the Exploreum’s limitations make clear that the region’s only dome theater — however excellent for science documentaries — cannot fill it. Whether a future anniversary, a different venue or new equipment eventually brings a Gump screening home is unknowable from here.
What is knowable is this: twenty years on, the story’s hometown remains Baldwin County — the Point Clear home of its author, the Fairhope stage where he will talk about it, and the Gulf waters its most famous storyline sails. The IMAX run lasts one week beginning September 5. The Evening with Winston Groom, shrimp boil and all, lasts one night — September 26 in downtown Fairhope. For locals deciding how to mark two decades of Gump, the choice looks a good deal easier than a drive to Montgomery.