I was out to see a movie last weekend, I saw “War of the Worlds”. The movie is ok, I am not rating it here. However the theatre experience was something a bit different from many other theatres I have been to.
Over the past couple of years, it’s been my experience to see more and more advertising videos before the feature movie. Yes it started with previews, and we still see those, but it then expanded to USMC commercials, car commercials, and now mini-movies for Coke. Ok, I suppose that’s all well and good, but if I wanted to see advertisements I would watch them on live broadcast tv.
So as I was saying, I have pretty much come to expect to se something like:
- slide show of trivia, ads, reminders, with or without audio or just music.
- announced start time for movie
- theatre real indicating that there is popcorn pop and candy up at the concession stand.
- commercial
- commercial
- commercial
- commercial
- commercial
- theatre real asking people to turn off cell phones and pagers (How about watch alarms? and can we torture the parents of screaming babies as well?)
- preview
- preview
- preview
- preview
- theatre real announcing it’s time for the feature
- Feature.
The commercials and previews can easily eat up 20 to 30 minutes as everyone putting them together realizes they have an audience that really doesn’t want to get up and leave.
Well, OK. I suppose the theatre isn’t making all that much money off of the movie the first couple of weeks they show it. In fact from what I understand the first two weeks something like 90% of the ticket price goes back to the distributors, and it is only after two weeks that the theatre sees something like 50% of the ticket sales. Of course there is a significant drop off in the number of viewers after two weeks, but that’s part of why the theatre would want to sell more advertising.
So as I was saying earlier, I went to see “War of the Worlds”. What was my pre-feature experience like?
- slide show of trivia, ads, reminders, with audio voice-over’s for the ads.
- announced start time for movie
- preview – The Island – (already in theaters)
- preview – King Kong – due out in December?
- theater real announcing the feature
- Feature.
In other words there was about a 5 minute delay between when the announced time of the movie, and the actual feature.
If you are interested, the chain involved is the Muller Family Theatres. It is a fairly small chain in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area, seven theatres, a total of 82 screens. The one in my neck of the woods is all stadium seating. They are online at http://www.mullerfamilytheatres.com
