Ferris Bueller is skipping school again — this time in theaters. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off returned to the big screen on April 17, 2026 for a nationwide 40th-anniversary run, with chains including Cinemark and Atom Tickets-listed theaters putting the 1986 comedy back on marquees four decades after it first played.

No fan-edit, no streaming re-upload — this is a real theatrical booking, the kind studios only bother with for movies that still sell tickets. Cinemark’s own listing frames it plainly: “40th Anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the big screen.”

The timing lines up with a second, on-the-ground way to celebrate. Chicago’s official tourism arm, Choose Chicago, has mapped the film’s actual filming locations for anyone who wants to retrace Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane’s route in person — not a highlight reel, an itinerary.

Key Points

• Nationwide 40th-anniversary theatrical rerelease landed April 17, 2026, per Cinemark’s official listing
• The rerelease is confirmed across multiple chains, including bookings tracked on Atom Tickets
• Chicago’s own tourism board documents seven real filming locations fans can visit, per Choose Chicago’s guide
• Stops include the Willis Tower observation deck, the Art Institute of Chicago, Wrigley Field, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Dearborn Street parade route with the Flamingo statue
• Local operators run dedicated guided walking tours built around the film’s route

According to the Choose Chicago location guide, the parking garage at Madison and Wells is where Cameron’s dad’s prized Ferrari makes its infamous exit, and the parade sequence downtown on Dearborn Street is still, in the tourism board’s own description, “the most famous scene of the movie.” The Art Institute stop even doubles as an unofficial art-history detour, with the same paintings that stopped the trio in their tracks still hanging where they were filmed.

The 1986 original starred Matthew Broderick as the title truant, with Alan Ruck and Mia Sara along for the ride and Jeffrey Jones playing the perpetually foiled Principal Rooney. Its 103-minute runtime and PG-13 rating are unchanged for the rerelease, per Cinemark’s listing, meaning audiences are getting the film exactly as it played in 1986, not a remastered cut with new scenes bolted on.

That matters for a movie whose whole appeal is specificity. Chez Quis, the restaurant Ferris talks his way into, was shot at a private residence on Schiller Street that’s since been remodeled, and the Chicago Board of Trade building doubles as both a working exchange and, per the same guide, a small museum. None of it is a soundstage. Chicago is as much a character in the film as its three leads, which is exactly why a walking tour of the route still works four decades later.

Forty years after Ferris talked his way out of school, out of trouble, and straight into pop-culture permanence, the movie doesn’t need nostalgia goggles to sell tickets — it’s doing it the old-fashioned way, one theater booking and one walking tour at a time.