This article is concerned with the ritually embedded character of open‐air cinema in Thailand. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Isaan and Bangkok and interviews with different actors within the ritual economy of open‐air cinema at shrines and temples. Outlining different ritual actions through which cinema is sponsored, it then focuses on a particular practice: pledging film screenings to spirits and deities at shrines. Looking at a specific site, a Daoist shrine in suburban Bangkok, it foregrounds the implications of a disjuncture between the personal nature of the spiritual transaction and the public character of its fulfillment. It considers these implications through an analysis of the spatial conjuncture formed when a projector casts its light in a particular setting, which is then appropriated by those customarily excluded by the institution of cinema in its commodity form.