Build Matinee: A Movie Discovery App with Next.js

Matinee is a movie discovery experience built around one simple goal: help someone find something worth the ticket price.

What you’ll build

You will build the application from the prepared Matinee interface into a working movie discovery product. The finished experience loads live movie data, lets users search and refine what they see, opens a dedicated page for each movie, and lets users save movies for later.

The work is organized around the actual application flow. You will build one piece, run it, verify it, and then use that working piece as the starting point for the next change. The explanations stay close to the code so you can understand why each part is being added without leaving the project for a separate theory course.

Prerequisites

You should be comfortable reading basic JSX, using React components, reading TypeScript, and running a Next.js application locally. You do not need prior TMDB experience.

The build path

The project grows in this order:

Movie data
→ discovery controls
→ movie details
→ wishlist state
→ wishlist persistence
→ server data route
→ final states and verification

By the end, Matinee will be a complete movie discovery app with a live browse experience, detail pages, a device-persistent wishlist, and the browser/server data flow that supports it.