The next time I want to see Timothée Chalamet I’ll do it from the comfort of my couch

[Frank Cox]

This is really how they do it in big theatres?

Ghawd!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/23/opini...art/index.html

Opinion: The next time I want to see Timothée Chalamet, I’ll do it from the comfort of my couch

Opinion by Sara Stewart

5 minute read
Published 8:30 AM EDT, Sat March 23, 2024

Warner Bros. Pictures Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN —
Last week, I ditched work one day and went to a matinee at a local AMC theater. It was a Timothée Chalamet movie, because statistically of course it was. “Dune: Part Two” was calling my name. There are few things this movie nerd loves more than a big, loud sci-fi fantasy epic on an IMAX screen.

As you’ve probably heard, the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s opus is quite long, at two hours and 46 minutes. (Though arguably, that’s the new normal.) But I was ready for that. I’d read up on my optimal pee break moments. I had my popcorn (if not my collectible sex-toy popcorn bucket). I was fired up to go back to Arrakis. (CNN and the distributor of “Dune: Part Two” share a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)

I took my reserved seat and sat down, waiting, like Nicole Kidman is always telling us, for the magic to happen.

Cut to 40 minutes after the start time on my ticket, when we were just watching the opening moments of Kidman’s PSA. Any expectation of “magic” had been sucked out of my soul long ago, starting with the braying Maria Menounos “Noovie” pre-show, cranked up loud enough to drown out any conversation with your friends.

Our actual show time then began with 10 minutes of aggressive ads, followed by a raft of trailers so extensive the entire audience began wearily half-laughing when yet another green preview screen popped up. But our giggles turned into stunned silence by the time we were treated to a second viewing of the trailer for “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.” Perhaps they thought it’d play more winningly the second time? Reader, it did not.

The sheer quantity of previews was obnoxious, but it wasn’t just that: Today’s trailers amount to seeing the majority of a movie’s big moments — long gone are the days of weird and mysterious previews that didn’t spell out every beat of a film. We had essentially watched 10 (or more) entire short films before the actual film we’d come to see. We were exhausted. And the opening credits for our movie hadn’t even rolled yet.

I don’t want to state the ass-numbingly obvious, but nobody wants to sit through more than half an hour of “content” before the nearly three-hour film they paid too much to see. It defies all logic to expect people to fork over more to be bombarded with ads and trailers they can’t mute or forward through the way they’d be able to do at home — where they can also sit on a comfier couch and eat better food. It’s as if big movie chains are responding to the dire warnings about the death of their industry by deciding they’ll simply force-feed their remaining audience as much monetizable property as possible.

I’d like to humbly suggest that they f**k off. What if we all take our movie theater dollars elsewhere — say, to pay to watch new releases at home, where you can nearly always get hold of them, even if it’s for $20 (still far less than what you’ll be paying if you buy even a single movie ticket and some concessions).

Will you miss out on the entrancing sight of Paul Atreides learning to ride a sand worm on an impossibly big screen? Tragically, yes. (It really is quite a cinematic moment.) But I’d argue if AMC, and the other theater chains, and Kidman, believe in delivering us the “magic” of the big-screen experience, the least they can do is make it less sadistic. Treat us like valued customers, not easy marks.

Despite everything I just said, I too still believe in the magic of movies. If you’re lucky enough to live near an Alamo Drafthouse, or another independent movie theater or small indie chain like Brooklyn’s Nitehawk, go give them all your money! Long live the fun movie theater experience, which is totally possible! It just seems like few developers outside of major urban centers think it’s a worthwhile investment. Better to let the crumbling 1980s theaters of the suburbs molder away with minimal improvements when absolutely necessary.

In a story last year, CNET’s Joan Solsman quoted an expert who summed up the pre-pandemic moviegoing most of us were more familiar with: “For generations, going to the movies meant ‘sitting in a sh*tty seat eating bad food, just to be able to watch the movie you want,’ said Bob Cooney, a location-based entertainment industry expert. Like airlines that get away with a punishing customer experience because flying is the only way to get from one far-flung place to another, theaters enjoyed cushy, long-lasting theatrical exclusives that were sacrosanct before the pandemic.”

But I don’t think that experience has fundamentally changed. Even if you’re going to see a new release in a state-of-the art IMAX or Dolby theater, you’re still going to be expected to absorb as much ad content (and yes, that includes trailers!) as they feel they can get away with.

Still, I’m sure it’ll make you happy to hear AMC saw a 23% increase in revenue in 2023, growing to $4.81 billion from $3.91 billion the year before. “AMC reported strong results for both the fourth quarter and full year of 2023, once again exceeding Wall Street’s consensus expectations,” said AMC CEO Adam Aron, whose salary is just shy of $24 million. (Something tells me that guy’s never been forced to sit through Noovie.)

I’ll be curious to see what the tipping point is for big cinema chains — will they push their audiences into a boycott, or call off the advertising onslaught? If AMC and their competitors know what side their popcorn is buttered on, the next time a Timothée movie is out, they won’t make us wait an hour to see him.

[Mark Ogden]

Will you miss out on the entrancing sight of Paul Atreides learning to ride a sand worm on an impossibly big screen? Tragically, yes.

IMG_3600.jpg

Here is the very scene she is talking about at last Tuesday's nearly deserted 3:00 show at the Cinemark down the road from me. Now that I am mostly retired, I see all first run product on Cheap Tuesday matinees. The ticket was $6.50 and a bottle of Aquafina purified Newark tap water was $5.50. The projection was first rate and the screen was big. More to this gal's point, the show was advertised for 3:00, which was when I pulled into the lot. By the time I get my ticket and drink, take a whiz, and get to my seat, it's feature time. What I am trying to say is that there are ways around the things she is griping about. By now, any reasonably savvy movie-goer should be hip to the fact that the feature isn't happening for 15 to 20 minutes past the advertised time and behaves accordingly.

BTW, the reason I took this shot was to send to a big Dune fan I know. I wanted him to explain to me how these guys get down off the giant worms when they get to where they're going.

[Ryan Gallagher]

But then you’ll have those that do what you do and show up fashionably late to a 70mm screening where they roll Zero ads/trailers. And then reasonably complain they were not informed ahead that it would start exactly when advertised.

I said in another thread cinemas should consider adopting “doors” and “film” times separately, like music and live theatre has always done.

But with the move to mostly reserved seating there is no longer any motivation to show up early and be subjected to preroll other than the concessions lines.

[Frank Cox]

I get the odd person here who walks in 20 minutes late and is shocked when they find out that the movie has already started.

They don't usually do that twice.

[Leo Enticknap]

I said in another thread cinemas should consider adopting “doors” and “film” times separately, like music and live theatre has always done.

Doing that is specifically prohibited in many if not all contracts between theater chains and advertisers.

[Mike Blakesley]

I said it in a movie review thread recently, but it bears repeating: AMC and the other chains are destroying this industry with their pre-shows. They think they're doing something really entertaining with "Noovie" and the like, but in reality, most people are just looking at their phones for everything up to the feature.

These idiots KNOW that people hate the long preshows, yet they keep making them longer and longer. Worse yet, they mix the ads and trailers together, which goes against every fiber of the movie business.

At the same time they put zero care into keeping their venues spick-n-span, and their projection tuned up, making the experience even worse.

On top of that they cheapen the concession experience by making you pour your own soda, butter your own popcorn, serve yourself candy and using "mobile ordering" to take the human experience out of the equation.

All while charging premium prices for all of it.

I would root for their decline and fall, except if they go away, the whole industry will go away and neighborhood theaters like mine will be out of business.

Someone should print out the article above (and this thread) and take it to CinemaCon next month and hand it to whatever big-shots from AMC are there, along with all the other chain big-shots too. Not that it will make any difference. And give a copy to Michael O'Leary (NATO president).

[Ryan Gallagher]

Doing that is specifically prohibited in many if not all contracts between theater chains and advertisers.

I guess that answers the "why" question. Even if they wanted to improve it they have been painting themselves further into this corner over time via the ad contracts.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't know who all owns chains like AMC and Regal. Didn't the Chinese Wanda group sell off a bunch of its stake in AMC?

The problems I see in big chain theaters, such as the 13-screen AMC/former-Carmike in my town, just absolutely reek of the handi-work of private equity companies or executives who have a private equity company mindset. Their ideology is cutting costs to the bone and doing whatever it takes to goose the stock price.

Our local multiplex never has enough staff on duty to handle peak crowds and keep auditoriums clean, much less do other important things like notice shit that is damaged, broken or out of kilter and get it fixed. The half-hour long block of commercials and trailers is all about generating revenue, no matter what it does to harm the movie-going experience.

I miss the days of 30+ years ago when I watched movies at theaters in New York City. The show time was pretty much the show time because you weren't going to see more than one or two trailers before the show started. There wasn't a block of TV commercials or other shit. Back then it was actually possible to sit through a show twice because the preshow was brief and the break between shows was also brief. Even at common multiplex theaters thru the 1990's the pre-shows weren't too awful bad. For the past 20 years they've become increasingly long and harder to tolerate. We can thank the bean-counters for that. They don't give two shits about the movie-going experience. All they can see are numbers in an MS Excel spreadsheet. These executives probably don't even watch movies in theaters at all.

Private equity companies and their mindset are ruining everything. Just look at the shit-show going on at Boeing. Its CEO is not an engineer. He's a bean counter steeped in private equity ideology. Even after that guy came on board after those 737 crashes the company's focus was far more on stock buy-backs and further cost cutting rather than doing anything to improve the company's operations. Is this company in the business of selling airplanes or is it a company that only sells shares of stock? Which is it?

The cinema industry smells like this same flavor of shit.

By now, any reasonably savvy movie-goer should be hip to the fact that the feature isn't happening for 15 to 20 minutes past the advertised time and behaves accordingly.

I agree customers can easily "game" a cinema's overly-bloated pre-show by arriving late. But there are two problems in doing so.

Problem #1: the customer might be stepping over many pairs of people's legs in a dark auditorium while getting to his seat. It's not fun doing that and even less fun when hauling a bucket of popcorn and soft drink. The people who already seated can get pretty pissy about a tardy person or group of people stumbling over the top of them in the dark.

Problem #2: reserved seating. It's clear a huge number of people have no respect at all for rules. When a customer deliberately arrives to the theater late there is an excellent chance he will find some jackass sitting in his reserved seat. Chances are also excellent the jackass will refuse to move. "Can't you go find another seat?" Violent incidents have occurred over this.

I would probably only choose to arrive late to a screening if the movie has already been out for a week or two, is playing on a smaller non-premium screen and the screening is happening at an off-peak time. If it's a Saturday evening show, opening weekend and playing in the "IMAX" house I'm going to arrive early -even though that means having to stomach a half-hour of TV commercials and trailers.

What ultimately happens though is I visit the commercial cinema on a less frequent basis. I seem to be going to the theater maybe once every 2 to 3 months and it's usually just to see "big" movies (such as Dune: Park 2). I have a huge HDTV screen at home. My Internet connection runs at a billion bits per second. Streamed content often looks great. It's a big difference from when I had a DSL connection and could get no better than severely compressed "720p" imagery. I'd still prefer to see movies in a huge commercial cinema auditorium. But the drawbacks of visiting a cinema are really stacking up.

[Jesse Skeen]

I get that theaters are paid to show the commercials and they obviously see more benefit to that than the people who no longer go because of them (or when I do, I contact the advertisers and tell them I don’t buy products advertised in places where ads shouldn’t be shown) but how do they benefit from showing so many trailers? I usually enjoy them but back when I started working at a theater in 1991, the average time for trailers was 5 minutes so if people showed up late we’d tell them if they missed any of the actual movie. Working in the booth I often timed the exact time of trailers on every movie, remember it was a big deal when they ran 10 minutes one time.

Trailers really wear out their welcome when there’s too many of them. I never liked showing the same ones with too many movies either, as that would turn off the people who came often and had to see them repeatedly. Besides, if you have 20 MINUTES of trailers, that eats into the time when you could be running another showing and get more paying customers!

Incidentally on my city’s Reddit group this morning there was a post about a local theater showing nearly 40 minutes of crap before the actual movie started, including the same trailer being repeated. That’s just ridiculous. If theaters want to show more trailers, why not sacrifice one of their worthless small 50-seat auditoriums that no reasonable person would happily pay to see a movie in, and instead just show trailers in those all day long and let people in for free to see them and buy some snack while they’re there?

[Geoff Jones]

What would happen if a theater advertised that they showed zero ads and 2-3 trailers? What would happen if theaters tried to address the myriad of problems that come up over and over again in articles like these?

Could they get the word out? Could they draw customers away from other theaters? Could they bring back the people that are content to watch at home?

It's an industry so averse to competitition, I doubt we'll ever know. Why bother to try when you can rely on the monopolies of regional clearances and release windows? Oops, those things are disappearing? What do we do now?


* I'm not talking about small indies serving tiny communities in rural Montana or Saskatchewan. That's a whole different world, and those sorts of places generally seem to care.

[Brad Miller]

This is how it always happens. Test the waters with a commercial. Some complaints, but no angry mob? Great! Let's keep doing that...and hey, let's test the waters with TWO commercials! Nobody got murdered? Attendance still seems to be about the same? Great! Hey here's an idea, let's try and sneak in 3 commercials, or commercials AFTER the start time, blah, blah, blah. Before anyone realizes it, the theaters are LITERALLY LOSING A PERFORMANCE EACH DAY because of these damned ads and driving customers away who are sick of it.

And the big half hour long preshows are not fooling anybody. It can be disguised as "entertainment" all they want, but it's nothing more than forcing commercials onto paying customers in the end and everyone knows this.

What needs to happen is some theaters need to prove this once and for all. Start advertising "ad-free shows". For example on that opening weekend of Dune 2, have one screen advertised as an "ad-free performance" and then run the regular shitshow-of-ads-in-your-face on the other. Charge $1 extra for the "ad-free" showtime.

That $1 per person, even if there aren't very many people in a given show, the theater will profit FAR MORE than the teeny tiny percentage that the theaters get from these preshow companies.

However it needs to be clearly advertised as a premium experience with a "don't be late" bit of marketing that clearly educates that the trailers will start promptly at showtime and the feature will begin NO MORE THAN 10 MINUTES LATER. And by that I mean absolutely, positively not even 10 minutes and 1 second. That's a hard rule never to be broken by any studio or director, period. If this limit was exceeded even on just one special movie, it would be no different than the commercial hell theaters have become because the line would continue to be pushed which is why the industry is stuck in this problem right now.

If some theaters would just do this, I think they would find out just how much customers HATE being a captive audience forced to watch commercials and promos (even if movie-related) for a show they PAID to see. If that marketing could be done in such a manner as to get word to all of those millions of people who have already given up on movie theaters because of the ads (and yes I don't think millions is an exaggeration), then those people could possibly be brought back again as paying customers. And again I stress, the theaters would actually profit more at the end of the year. It's sort of like paying YouTube a couple bucks a month to turn off all ads.

[Mark Ogden]

What would happen if a theater advertised that they showed zero ads and 2-3 trailers? What would happen if theaters tried to address the myriad of problems that come up over and over again in articles like these?

Could they get the word out? Could they draw customers away from other theaters? Could they bring back the people that are content to watch at home?

Abso-freakin'-lutely they could, and I say that with conviction because it has already been tried. That was the way the late and much-lamented ArcLight Cinemas operated. No ads, no more than three trailers, and the feature. You paid a little more for your ticket, mind you, but people happily did. The ArcLight complex that was built around the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood was legendary, and I miss it terribly as does every dedicated filmgoer out there.

I don't think anyone will ever know what really happened, but Pacific's parent company used the pandemic as an excuse to shut ArcLight down coast to coast. This is NOT to say that their business model was a failure, they shut down the notoriously ad-heavy Pacific circuit as well. They wound up closing some highly profitable and much beloved theaters.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Here is a flip-side perspective from our non-profit live venue that moonlights as a cinema for premieres/classics/festivals.

We might have one sponsor spot for the summer series, that sponsor is local and underwrites a chunk of the whole series. It's almost always our local city contracted transit company.

But beyond that, we open doors an hour before the show (waiting outside is to be avoided in Texas summer heat), and advertise both doors and film times, which we try to nail within seconds, some people do arrive that early, and we have live human ushers!

What fills the screen during that time? Slides of the engagements coming up at the venue, if during a festival or series, mostly slides about other films.

What do you hear during that time? MUSIC!, often intentionally curated to go with the film, a fun side-gig that the projectionists gets to dream up. (We have ASCAP and BMI licenses so most things are available). Admittedly ushers are the only ones who get to enjoy the entirety of the playlist creations, and they often sing their praises.

At some point they might add a summer series season sizzle bumper. But we are talking about 3 minutes tops of actual pre-roll if you ignore the silent slides. If we showed more than that our film subscribers would probably riot.

Sometimes a cult/classic will be curated by a local film-club, and they typically have a new work short film to show before hand. Remember short films? People still make those! Maybe corporate cinemas should consider letting some of them be seen by a wider audience instead of commercials?

And whenever our pre-roll / intro speaker structure permits it, we close a gorgeous main drape before then film, and open it as the film starts. Music and a lovely curtain is preferable to most things you could put on a screen ahead of a film, with maybe the exception of curated shorts.

When I was younger I distinctly remember the days when we started to see commercials that also play on TV appear on the big screen. The weird ad spots prior to that that were cinema exclusive were not so bad, but once the lines started to blur it seemed out very out of place and effectively cheapened the experience.

[Bobby Henderson]

Trailers really wear out their welcome when there’s too many of them. I never liked showing the same ones with too many movies either, as that would turn off the people who came often and had to see them repeatedly. Besides, if you have 20 MINUTES of trailers, that eats into the time when you could be running another showing and get more paying customers!

With the sheer amount of trailers and TV commercials included in a typical pre-show playlist I'm sure the theater would be able to squeeze in at least one extra show per day if they went back to pre-show lengths typical of the 1980's or even the early 1990's.

And, yeah, these trailers wear out their welcome very quickly. A long time ago I kind of enjoyed watching movie trailers (especially the 70mm trailers that were played on the front of some 70mm movies). They seemed a little more creative back then. And they weren't likely to spoil the entire damned movie either. The typical movie trailer today just seems like a piece of regurgitated clip art. The marketing departments of movie studios have clip art templates for each genre and just carbon copy the hell out of them. Any new movie trailer today feels like I've seen a thousand times before.

It gets sort of grimly entertaining to witness crowd reactions to yet another MPAA green band hitting the screen. By about the 5th or 6th trailer I start hearing some grumbling. If more trailers keep coming I'll either hear laughing or people cussing out loud at those green bands.

What fills the screen during that time? Slides of the engagements coming up at the venue, if during a festival or series, mostly slides about other films.

In 1993, the first time I visited General Cinemas' Northpark 1-2 in Dallas (to get blown away by Jurassic Park in its legendary THX house) that's how they handled the down time between shows. A slide projector was showing some ads for local businesses. They had John Williams' music score to Jurassic Park playing as house music. The foreboding tune "Dennis Steals the Embryo" got in my head so much I had to buy the soundtrack CD soon after seeing the movie.

Before the industry-wide switch to digital projection it was common for many theaters to use slide projectors to play ads. But rather than merely play music at a low volume level more and more were doing the "movie tunes" stuff where you hear a song and then at least one or two ads and some "DJ" who won't shut up. Once digital projection became commonplace so did all the video-based ads that play before the actual half-hour long pre-show begins.

Proponents of digital projection don't like it when anyone says it's like watching a big TV screen. Well, when there are TV commercials playing on it non-stop it really does feel like watching a fucking TV screen! Except I don't have a mute button for that TV commercial shit like I do for my big TV set at home.

[Ryan Gallagher]

In 1993, the first time I visited General Cinemas' Northpark 1-2 in Dallas (to get blown away by Jurassic Park in its legendary THX house) that's how they handled the down time between shows. A slide projector was showing some ads for local businesses. They had John Williams' music score to Jurassic Park playing as house music. The foreboding tune "Dennis Steals the Embryo" got in my head so much I had to buy the soundtrack CD soon after seeing the movie.

Amusingly enough, we tend to have a soft policy on our playlists that we DON'T play exact music from the score/film. We want those memories to come flooding back DURING the film. Might make exceptions for music from other installments of the series, or ST credits that only "barely" made it in, in that you only hear a snippet of the song. It also makes the playlist building more of a cerebral exercise in finding songs on the theme, can't just slap the ST on and forget about it.

And yeah, by slides i mean the modern digital equivalent. ;-)