'Scuse me, 'scuse me, 'scuse me...

At MSNBC, Andy Dehnart quite justifiably rails against what Regal Cinemas, for one, is calling "The 2wenty": "Essentially, movie theater chains have found a way to give us even more advertising: by running pre-show ad films while the lights are still on and audiences are finding their seats."

If you haven't experienced these audial and visual onslaughts firsthand, they may not seem like all that big a deal; but as you read all his well-argued objections, check your pulse and see if it isn't racing a tad more furiously. Dehnart also points to an organization that's trying to do something about it, the Captive Motion Picture Audience of America, but Flickhead, who sent along the appreciated tip, notes two points Dehnart could have emphasized: First, "We pay $10 a piece to sit through this garbage." And second, though it's the chains' own deal, the studios aren't raising the slightest objections. After all, most of their revenue now comes from DVD sales. Whether or not Flickhead's assertion that the studios "don't give a shit about people who go to movie theaters" holds water, that's the impression.

I'd just like to point out that, not only could it be worse, it is - in Europe. At least in the US, features actually begin more or less at the advertised time. Not here. A 9 pm showing, say, all too often actually begins at 9:20, even 9:30, once all the ads unreel (and I don't mean trailers - ads, some of them merely blown up from the broadcast video versions we've already zapped away from on our TVs at home, but of course, as a captive audience in a theater, you can't). In Germany, this swath is interrupted only by a break to sell ice cream. Seriously.

At any rate, moviegoers here have long grown savvy to the practice, and so, they simply make their reservations online and arrive 20 or 30 minutes past the time the theater has promised the feature would begin. Often, this works out fine. But woe to the moviegoer who's expected a 20-minute block of ads to precede a screening of, oh, I dunno, some anime feature only playing for a week or so anyway and the chain's decided that the audience will be so small, they're only worth 10 minutes of ads.

Personally, I'm set. Much to the frustration of my family, I'm determined to have our butts in those seats at the time printed in the paper or on the site precisely because the chain-owners might well be inclined toward such arbitrary decisions. You never know. But: That doesn't protect us from the pseudo-savvy stragglers anticipating the usual delay. Which means that, during those crucial first ten minutes or so, for which the entire team of filmmakers has put its best foot forward in order to grab you and escort you elsewhere, you're raising your knees to your chin to allow those pseudo-savvy stragglers to bumble along towards their seats, all the while, hissing, "When did it start? How much have we missed?"

This whole theatrical phase of a film's release is in a seemingly nonstop decline. The experience is becoming less and less inviting as the quality of home viewing rises, windows between theatrical and DVD releases shrink and families in particular realize they can have a lot more fun for a lot less money just waiting a bit for the DVD.

Posted by dwhudson at April 16, 2005 4:20 PM