Went to see Dark Waters last night (excellent movie, BTW). Before the movie I experienced a new low in post scheduled start time, pre-feature advertising. Scheduled start time was 6:45. Ten minutes of ads. Three previews. Then another ad (for a huge Lincoln SUV, I think). Two more previews. Then two more ads (one for I think Diet Sprite, the other for the theater chain’s movie club). Then finally the feature started close to 6:10.
Ads before the previews were bad enough. Showing a ridiculous number of previews was bad enough. Now there are ads between and after the previews. How long until there are commercial breaks in the features themselves?
Not at all surprised. All of the theaters in my town have switched to reserved seating, which means no need to show up early for good seats, which means fewer eyeballs on pre-trailer advertisements.
I’ve noticed they started sandwiching in an ad during the trailers. And one post trailer ad for the theatre chain (but that’s always been there). The trailers do, however, start right at the showtime.
Wow, I remember the first time I showed a movie with an ad at the theater where I worked as a projectionist. The year was 1990, and it was a very short advert for Coke.
It struck me as super weird to have an ad before a movie people were paying to see, but it was clearly a sign of things to come.
Ads are annoying but the whole pre-movie show is bad. I love trailers but what we get now is ridiculous. Lats movie I saw in a theater (Knives Out) had 25 minutes of trailers. Way too much and if you go to the movies a lot you see the same ones again and again (not even including technical difficulties like how they showed us the trailer for Bombshell twice in a row). There was a point where I could recite the entire trailer for 21 Bridges. Let’s limit the trailers to four and make everyone’s lives better. Or even three.
I never had more than 3 on my films: 2 or 3 trailers followed by the short clip that talked about fire exits and told everyone to be civilized in the theater followed by the main feature.
Perhaps this was because it was a pain in the backside to add and remove trailers. Because they were spliced into the beginning of the full length of film, one had to use various tricks in order to swap out trailers in a film that was already built up and loaded on the platter.
Today I imagine they are programmed at the click of a mouse, or perhaps programmed remotely at cinema HQ. If someone works in a modern theater, perhaps the can explain how trailers work these days.
Projectionist here. The most prominent US distributor, Deluxe Technicolor, sends out a hard drive once a week with multiple trailers on it. Smaller or non-affiliated companies will send out thumb drives. Ads, same deal. Which and how many are used is up to the chain or independent theater owner.
Yes, swapping them out is a piece of cake. Occasionally, if there’s a delay in starting the show, say because of an unexpected big crowd, we’ll ditch some or all of the extras for a show or two.
I work in an independent so I can’t comment on how the chains do it. We run a ten-minute program of ads for local businesses, which is sent to us monthly by a company that produces the ads. This is set to start ten minutes before showtime. At the official start time will be three or four trailers. Latecomers appreciate the grace period before the movie proper goes on.
Generally there’s no one monitoring whether anything gets cut. Shhh - it’s our little secret.
I remember the old days when a feature film could be 30-ish pounds of film. Now they come on drives. Do you get all of your movies on one drive per week, or do they ship each title on its own drive?
The pace of technology change in cinema is fascinating. We had a rapid development of digital surround formats beginning in the late 80s, then less than 20 years later, digital feature distribution and projection hit the screens and took off like a celluloid vault fire.
Now, physical film is so obsolete that I was able to get a 4KW Xetron console, a Century head, and some reels for absolute free from a local theater. I gutted the console and turned it into a bar. If I had the room and a purpose for them, I probably could have taken their makeup table and trees as well.
One film per drive. These are “ingested” (that’s what they call it) into either a master server, which disburses it to individual projectors in a multiplex, or directly to the projectors themselves, each of which has its own storage. Yon can also if you wish run a show directly off the drive, or “live play”.
Physical film still exists, and in some parts of the world is quite viable. If you’re running a shoestring operation in Bangkok, you need to use equipment that, if it breaks down, you can grab your toolkit and box of scavanged spare parts and get it working again. Digital systems are unfriendly to that sort of thing.
In the US, obviously film exhibition has taken a hit, but if you’re lucky enough to live in certain places, now and then a title will come out in 35mm (Little Women is the latest) and be shown in theaters that are still set up for it.
Many moons ago when I was running a theater, we were located on the third floor of a mall. We VERY quickly learned that we could NOT have multiple shows exiting at once, because guess what escalators do when they are overloaded? ]
Think dominoes.
So after being up until after sunrise doing print changes Thursday night by myself for 12 screens, I would stroll into work to frantic managers on Friday evening demanding a change to the run times if they didn’t meet what we were told.
Thanks for the insight into the new way of doing things!
My time was in the late 80s, early 90s. Every Thursday night I was there at 1am breaking down the outgoing prints and building the new prints. I kind of miss that quiet solitary activity.
The distributor would leave the cans with the new films inside the side exit–typically 2 big cans holding six 20-minute reels, seven for a long movie.
We would snip off the headers and footers and splice them all together into one big pancake of film on a platter system, and reverse the process for the outgoing prints.
My theater had 9 screens, so it wasn’t as much work as The Vorlon had, but it still took time.
I remember the excitement we had when I finished putting together the original Batman movie and everyone working that night at the theater stayed after to watch a private showing of the movie at 2am.
It sure was painful getting up for my day job the next morning!
That’s weird; the other day my girlfriend and I went to see Knives Out and walked into the theater a few minutes (not more than five or ten) after the posted start time and thought there would still be ads and trailers showing, but the movie had already started.
I don’t know what we missed; the first thing we saw were the two detectives (plus Daniel Craig sitting in the background hitting a piano key now and then) questioning a series of family members, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.