30 minute ads and trailers
In an age of streaming and movie theaters are fighting to survive, when butts won’t show up for the seats, exhibitors have resorted to adding more ads to their pre-movie showing as an effort to make a bit more money. In the last year, you might have seen a little asterisk added to online times on the theaters’ websites telling ticket-buyers to “allow up to 30 minutes for trailers and ads at start time.” AMC would famously institute this new practice, but other theater chains would follow suit. Now, you have a lengthy list of trailers at the beginning of showings and right in the middle of it, you will see a commercial for some kind of business.
Tom Rothman addresses the issue
CinemaCon is in full swing this week. While studios usually take this time to push what their companies will be releasing next, Variety reports that Sony‘s Tom Rothman also used his platform to call out movie theater exhibitors on the latest practice of growing the pre-show so that the movie doesn’t actually start until after 30 minutes of the listed time. At Caesar’s Palace, Rothman told the attendees in his audience to “Get off the ad crack” and “Get rid of the endless advertising and substantially shorten the long pre-shows.”
Rothman would point out that the new system has audiences purposefully showing up 30 minutes late to skip all the ads and trailers, especially with reserved seating making it easier to hold their seats. Therefore, Rothman says that the viewers “don’t even see the trailers” and this results in “enticements gone to waste.”
Additionally, Rothman also proposes that studios “Enforce longer windows” and added, “Yes, even if that means you cannot play every film.” The Sony boss would also plead with studios to invest in more original stories to release along with their bigger franchise titles. He explained, “For all the success of films driven by existing intellectual property, originality is essential to movies. Neither movie theaters nor the art form itself can survive without at least some originality. After all, you can’t make a sequel to nothing.”
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