Now there are two things that can happen here. First is positive. Theaters who put on a great presentation will be reported here as a quality place to see a movie. It will let people (at least those who read this site) know where their best chances are of having a good experience at a particular theater. It will also quietly let the people behind the scenes at a particular theater get a pat on the back. Any studios lurking about will also see the reports from the field as well as the district offices for these theaters.

On the flip side, such a forum could undoubtedly be a blunt and harsh instrument to those theaters who do a poor job of putting on a show. Are we worried about hurting people's feelings who do a sloppy job? Or would it be more politically appropriate to not post such a forum to keep these theaters running along quietly?

In the end, would theaters reading bad reviews of their location take the extra effort to improve? Would this just anger people and accomplish nothing? Will people take the time to report GOOD experiences? Will people NOT post reports on THEIR OWN theaters? Would this possibly assist the studios and the TAP program in their quest for presentation excellence? Could this assist companies like Kodak and the printing labs of patterns with particular releases? And so forth, and so on...

Other things to consider would be how such a forum should be organized. Should this be done per theater complex, or by movie title? (I am leaning more towards movie title, for it would be potentially interesting to see how the print condition decreases over time. Also, there are several hundred theaters in the US alone!)

I've toyed with the idea for months now since the first time it was brought up and I've decided to just let the members vote it out. Please respond here on the forum (email responses will not be counted) as to your opinion, for or against such a forum, along with your reasoning. The majority vote will be the deciding factor.

This should be interesting.

Maybe there could be some sort of posting guidelines? I'm sure the UBB program isn't set up for this but I have an idea to spitball:

There could be categories for each aspect of the presentation... framing, focus, sound, etc. Each one would have a rating from 1 to 10. If it was set up as a form with check boxes or entry boxes for for each category. Not only would this keep things on an objective level but it would give a way to calculate average ratings on each theatre.

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Reviews are subjective, forcing posters to use a form would instill at least a small amount of objectivity. The next problem to tackle would be further standardizing the ratings. Like "film done right," I suspect "reviewing done right" would take a lot more effort than most people are willing to provide.

Brad, you wrote: "It will let people (at least those who read this site) know where their best chances are of having a good experience at a particular theater." unless you somehow linked to Yahoo movie times and gave Scott a nervous breakdown increasing server capability, this would seem to be more wishful thinking than any real usefulness. The idea of putting these reports in front of the public and district offices might have a small positive effect, but one must temper such optimism with the fact that bean counters haven't loosened purse strings or returned full time projectionists to many theatres, even though we have regularly complained about those issues here.

One issue that would be tricky to address would be the possibility of a reviewer coming across illegal activity. While those interested in presentation might not focus on the problem, it is there, it does affect the theatre and distributor, and there are legal implications to reporting it. I've done more than my fair share of theatre audits, and if I went in on blind checks with the idea of looking for problems, I'm sure I'd find doormen passing in friends, ticket scams, intentional misrings at concession, auditorium swappers, and other theft in addition to the presentation issues Evans mentions.

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Digital City reviews are hard to find (here's a sample) and you will see a lot of "I liked the movie" type of review mixed with reviews of the complex. I wouldn't go the forum route, as it would encourage off-topic discussion. SRAT's form system looks decent, but I don't think it's been updated in a couple of years. Also, his form sends an email that he has to convert.

I thought about doing something like this on my site a while back, but (ideally) it would have involved going to a live database instead of an offline database producing static pages. Too much work and not enough time.

Maybe Brad can get Evans to share some of his Perl knowledge to come up with a live version of his Decatur/Huntsville database. If the site's running on Apache, I think there's support of MySQL and PHP databases built in (or there are mods available).

quote:

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I've been getting this request a lot lately to open up a forum specifically for reporting presentation quality in theaters. (No, it's not just Evans submitting the idea over and over. These emails are actually coming from different people).

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Actually, I don't think I've ever actually requested a forum for theatre reviews, although the link to my site, which contains reviews, is in my signature, which appears on most of my posts.

Getting people to be objective is the most difficult part of letting people post reviews. I know this because at times, I've found it a bit difficult to be objective at times, but I've made myself do it.

Since most of the people on this forum work at a movie theatre, I'm not sure that having staff members of theatres rate their own theatres or rate other (possible competing) theatres is a good idea, and may lead to personal problems on these forums. I have a tendency to believe that this might be a very bad idea. If I knew there were staff members of the theatres in my area here, I probably would not criticize their presentation here on the forums simply to avoid personal problems with people. I'd let them come to the reviews on my site rather than bringing my reviews to the forums if that were the case.

I think reviews of theatres should be done by customers of theatres, or a third party specializing in such reviews. This third party should not work for or be associated with any particular theatre or theatre company. The reviews should be in two categories: technical and non-technical. Technical reviews are by people who have enough knowledge to look for a wide range of technical problems when watching a presentation. Nontechnical reviews are done by the average customer who has no idea how film works. The two types of reviews would likely address different aspects of a theatre's environment and presentation. Mine are of the tchnial variety, which most of the comment cards that Regal received from customers are probably of the non-technical variety. I've never seen an existing "theatre review" sytem that addresses all the issues I feel are important, so I do it my own way.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

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I think all registered members should be allowed to post their critical notes. I like the Idea of a form that could be printed out with the critical questions so we are all working toward the same end.
Personal opinions can always be added.

This forum can be a good thing as long as we do not make it personal to the owner or the employees.

Everyone here shares a common love for film. We all want it to be shown in the correct format with the proper sound.

I would probably be more critical of first run houses than I would of the theatres with the under belly runs.

Many of the low grossing auditoriums do not generate the monies to maintain equipment the way the large chains do. However if they run a clean theatre with proper presentation they can survive.

That's nice, but how much of a theaters problems are employee, management, or owner related!?