You guys don’t know how good you’ve had it for so long. This is the way it’s always been where I live.
I’m not feeling the outrage. As far as I’m concerned, a trailer is just another advertisement. Why do I care if the product being advertised is a movie or a soda or a pick-up truck?
I think the first time I saw a product other than a movie advertised before a movie was in1993, 94. I was in Cambridge UK at the time and found it notable that really cool, beautifully produced ads for Levis and such were run before the movies.
Anyway, if the advertised start time is, say, 7:00, I expect to see ads looping before 7:00. At 7:00 I want the lights to go down, maybe three trailers or interesting, high-quality ads to play, then the movie to start. Yeah, I don’t get my wish unless I go to an art house type of place. The ever-increasing amount of time devoted to trailers/ads between the advertised start time and the actual movie is one of the reasons I don’t go to the mongo-plex much anymore.
The Rise of Skywalker had a good half-hour worth of trailers and ads when I saw it tonight, which I think is the most I’ve experienced.
This would be OK with me. Theaters (chains) here start the 10 minutes of ads at showtime (before showtime there is basically some sort of long infomercial masquerading as a TV show) followed by at least 6 trailers. Feature typically starts 25 minutes after showtime. That sucks.
Then the other night they cut the number of trailers to 5, but added commercials in the middle of the trailers and between the trailers and the feature. That sucks even more.
I’ve worried that theaters would start randomly starting features on time to screw with those of us who deliberately show up late. Maybe that’s what happened to you? I generally arrive at the theater around the start time but spend some time getting popcorn (after getting approved for the financing), bathroom breaks, looking at the coming attraction posters, etc. before actually heading to my seat (reserved). Haven’t yet had the guts to show up later than that.
I consider it a baked-in 20-30 minute tardiness window.
That’s pretty typical around here, at least at the dominant player, Century/Cinemark. There’s a Noovie pre-show, then at the advertised start time, the house lights dim and the trailers/ads begin. Bladder check…gotta pee? Go now! Can’t remember the last time they ran fewer than five trailers/ads. When they run the clip of people finishing other lines at the snack bar, you know the actual movie is seconds away.
All seating is reserved in their “Luxury Loungers” so we normally roll into the parking lot at or slightly before the advertised start time. Only time we get there early is if we know we want to get snacks, but usually, we’ve either just had real food or planning to have dinner after. Through some stroke of mis-branding, the road side of the theater looks like a furniture store because all you can see is the big LUXURY LOUNGERS sign. Nothing to say “Hey, we got movies here!” :smack:
At least with the huge number of screens at complexes these days, coupled with not having to move prints around the booth anymore, the old problem of having 5 minutes between shows is gone. One cinema in Boston way back in the day had Superman II on one side and Raiders on the other–and 5 minutes between shows to fill and dump 1800 people through a lobby the size of a suburban living room. The projectionist helped out–they had Todd-AO projectors, so when the credits came on, the frame rate changes to 30fps from the normal 24, and everyone marched up the aisles faster…
The advantage my old cinema had was that we were 15 miles from the film exchange, and would get the prints released to us on Monday or Tuesday, and I could get my booth minions to build them up on 6000’ reels ahead of the mad scramble on Thursday night. I would have three prints loading onto the platters while I was breaking down two more to go out the door. It still took until dawn, not counting trying to run them once to make sure that no one miscounted on the splices.
At Star Wars yesterday before the movie there was a five plus minute short animated movie about a little girl whose family is too busy to be build a snowman with her climbs through a clock to a magical clock shop where an old man gives her a card that tell her family to play with her which of course works. Then randomly at the end it says Eat at Chick-fil-A.
The pitch at the end was so random and out of place the audience literally laughed. It was supposed to be very Disney and heart warming but the Chick-fil-A reference was just so random it was funny.
I guess the OP doesn’t go to the movies much. 20-25 mins of previews is standard at AMC and has been for a couple years at least.
Reminds me of this Simpsons commercial parody
I wasn’t intending to be snarky! I offered the correct explanation. Now if my time machine worked I could fix that. (And so many other things. Oh yes…)
?? In Aus, I remember slides before the movie. Furniture, local business, whatever.
10 years ago, they were still showing ‘slides’ before the movies in some theatres – although technically they weren’t slides at all, having long ago gotten rid of the equipment that did that.
Same for me. I saw it two days ago in a Las Vegas suburb. Scheduled showtime was 3:45 pm. Ads and trailers started at 3:50 pm. Feature film started at 4:15 pm.
Interestingly, they kept the house lights on until the feature film started.
Start the Movie!
Do they ever show trailers for movies that aren’t showing or scheduled to be shown at that theater? It seems to me that they don’t.
Long ago in my youth a typical theater had one screen, and they showed at most three trailers. Nowadays of course nearly every theater has multiple screens (I think one local one has 21) so they can and do show many trailers.
Trailers. at least when I ran a theater, came in two ways–some prints came with a trailer on the head, and other trailers came from National Screen Service, or infrequently, from the studios themselves.
It happened all the time. I don’t think most people realize how many films are released every year. Even the forgettable ones were usually preceded by trailers.
And in my theater most trailers came separately, with the occasional single trailer coming already attached to the head from the distributor. We would also get cartoons from time to time.
I remember when trailers were for other movies currently out. Now they all seem to be for upcoming attractions that may be the better part of a year away.