The Man Behind FirstShowing.net

Now I know most of you have probably never heard of Alex Billington. He isn’t a blogger like John Chow or Jon Waraas, but he is a good friend of mine that is doing great things. Alex runs FirstShowing.net, which is a movie news website. You will find everything from reviews to event coverage. Lately FirstShowing has been hitting it big by getting on the front page of Digg at least once a week, but before we get into all that let’s talk about how I met Alex.

A few years ago I was searching the web and found that CMU was having a LAN party. I was really into the LAN party scene, being part of the biggest LAN group in Pittsburgh, Pittco and going too many different LAN’s my friend Zach and I decided to go check it out. The event was run very well and the man behind it was Alex. After the LAN party Alex and I exchanged info and started talking online. It was weird because we both had a lot in common, we liked the same music, movies, etc. So eventually we became friends and hung out from time to time. Over the years Alex was written for ThinkComputers and every year I take him to CES with me.

When Alex was in college (at CMU) he kept on telling me how much he didn’t like it. I told him about my college experience. He was like me and wanted to do his own thing. He decided to leave CMU to fully dedicate himself to what he wanted to do, which was FirstShowing.net.

When Alex and friends were camping out for X-Men 3 and he thought it would be a good idea to start a blog about their camp-out adventures. FirstShowing came online around late May of 2006. FirstShowing is quite a unique name. Alex tells me since Star Wars Episode 1 came out in 1999 he has been going to the first showing of every last movie big or small. So he decided to use FirstShowing as the name. The thing that makes FirstShowing so different from other sites is that they never mention home theatre or DVD’s, they focus primarily on the theatrical experience. So this makes them very unique. FirstShowing has really grown since it has started. Alex has really done a great job and spends most of his day working on the site. FirstShowing still camps out for movies, they have a full event schedule.

It’s really great to see a good friend be able to do what I do, work for himself. It’s not easy to start a site from scratch and build it up, but Alex has done it and I’m very proud of him. Alex really does not like to brag, but he says one of his accomplishments was being able to go to Sundance. If you are at all into movies than I would definitely check out FirstShowing.