# IMDB ruined their theater listings **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 5, 2011, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819 "2011-05-05T06:38:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2011, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/21 "2011-05-07T16:08:50Z")
> [@drastic\_quench](#): > > I don’t really get “the why” of it. I get that you would rather decide en route, but don’t you narrow your choices just by the films you’d prefer to see? I’m lucky if there’s two movies out at once that I want to see, and I love movies. My wife and I have very eclectic tastes, being equally happy to see an art film, action movie, Bollywood musical, whatever…there are always half a dozen films I could see playing in Chicago. > [@](#): > > I’ll even grant that it is dumb that a site would harm its own useful simplicity, I just don’t see a need for a master list of all this information when one’s tastes already dictate most of the options. Isn’t this info already in a printed and portable version from the Trib? Here is the thing, if either of us is working late, or the train gets delayed, plans have to be adjusted. As for the Trib, that costs a lot more than a piece of paper from my laser printer and no longer lists every theater, especially on weekdays. > [@MsWhatsit](#): > > Does the Chicago Reader not print movie times anymore? That’s what I used to use back in the Dark Ages before smartphones when I lived in Chicago. The Reader does, but a lot of theaters have no listing or incomplete ones. And, depending on the day of the week, it is difficult to find a copy. > [@panamajack](#): > > It was mentioned before, but [Google’s Showtimes](http://www.google.com/movies?near=chicago%2C+IL) is, as said, quite clean. The title, all the showtimes, the movie length in plain text, and almost nothing else extraneous. Clicking a title filters to just theaters showing it. Clicking a time usually allows you to buy tickets online when possible. About the only downside is you only have the choice between a single theater or all the ones nearby (I don’t know if signing in to Google lets you customize it). > > It doesn’t always get noticed because I think it only shows up on a search if you type “showtimes \”. I don’t believe Google allows you to customize a list of theaters, though I will check. Re-reading this thread, can we all agree that the new version is not an improvement. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2011, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/22 "2011-05-08T02:06:38Z")
> [@gaffa](#): > > Right, the Car Culture thinks that everything in the same zip code is “close”. I don’t think of the zip code of any place unless I’m mailing them something - I think of bus and train routes. Yeah, the Zip code thing works because you know your own Zip code, and it sorts geographically from there. It assumes distance is key, not access. Car culture indeed. ---
**Author:** ![Equipoise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/equipoise/32/151_2.png) [@Equipoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Equipoise)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2011, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/23 "2011-05-08T03:18:39Z")
> [@MsWhatsit](#): > > Does the Chicago Reader not print movie times anymore? That’s what I used to use back in the Dark Ages before smartphones when I lived in Chicago. > [@gaffa](#): > > The Reader does, but a lot of theaters have no listing or incomplete ones. And, depending on the day of the week, it is difficult to find a copy. The Chicago Reader print version doesn’t list movie times anymore. I used to get a Reader, tear out that page and carry it with me in my purse. They took away the main reason I picked up a copy of The Reader. > [@gaffa](#): > > I don’t believe Google allows you to customize a list of theaters, though I will check. Neither The Reader online or Google lets you customize your theaters. IMDB was nice that way. You could choose the theaters you go to most often to show first, so you didn’t have to scroll through a list of theaters that aren’t important to you, but they could still be on the list in case you needed them. You could just click on the name of a theater then print the listings for that theater. I hate to pile on something that’s free but damn, they really did turn something very very useful and handy into something worse than useless. [QUOTE=drastic\_quench] I don’t really get “the why” of it. I get that you would rather decide en route, but don’t you narrow your choices just by the films you’d prefer to see? I’m lucky if there’s two movies out at once that I want to see, and I love movies. [/QUOTE] My husband and I could easily see 2-3-4+ movies in one day, and would not blink an eye at seeing multiple movies in multiple theaters in one day. I recently did 5 movies in 3 different theaters. I saw 329 movies in the theater last year. I’m already up to 162 since January of this year. I see a LOT of movies in a lot of different theaters. There are a core group of theaters I go to most often, for specific reasons, mainly to save money. There’s $5 movies anytime at the Gene Siskel Film Center because I’m a member, $5 Mondays at the Music Box, $6 Tuesdays at City North 14, Friday matinees at Evanston Century. There’s $5 double & triple features at the Brew & View, $4 and $5 movies at the Logan, $6 member movies at the Showplace ICON, $5 Wednesdays at the Portage, $6.50 movies at the Davis. There are other more expensive choices, such as River East 21, Pipers Alley and the 600 for first-run movies using Costco coupons, but we’ll be going to those less often since they’re AMC and I’m very angry with AMC now since they dropped their MovieWatcher program. There’s also the Navy Pier IMAX, and the Landmark Century. There are more than we could go to if we wanted, but usually what we want to see is playing somewhere closer, except for Doc films, where I’d probably live if it were closer and cheaper, and Facets, which I never go to for some reason. All of these theaters were on my customized IMDB theater showtimes page, in the order of importance to me. The theaters I never ever go to were not on my customized listing or were way way down the list as a “just in case” listing. All that painstaking and useful customization, gone, in a flash, just like that. Son of a bitch! IMDB was my Go-To place for movie listings, and now the main site is useless to me for that purpose. So far they haven’t screwed around with the mobile app, which is still very useful to me except that I can’t print out the listings, but I expect that to become useless shortly since they seem bound and determined to shoo me away from their site. Yeah, I know it was free and I have no right to bitch, but I can’t help being bothered. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2011, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/24 "2011-05-09T05:17:15Z")
If you’re using Firefox there’s an addon which should give you what you want, ie the text from the IMDB page without the images. [Image Block](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/image-block/) ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2011, 7:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/25 "2011-05-09T07:26:03Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > If you’re using Firefox there’s an addon which should give you what you want, ie the text from the IMDB page without the images. > > [Image Block](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/image-block/) No, that doesn’t work. It hides the images, but definitely does not accomplish anything worthwhile. Instead, we now have a huge page with white space where the posters used to be with text. It does not give us the old, excellent listings by theater. The more I think about this, the more annoying and depressing it gets. All that useful data list. Hopefully there is a Google engineer who is also a huge movie buff who has decided that their personal project will be to enhance Google’s movie listings to be at least as useful as the old IMDB listings. ---
**Author:** ![Reno\_Nevada](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Reno\_Nevada](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reno_Nevada)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2011, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/26 "2011-05-09T14:19:05Z")
I use the Yahoo! movie listing (yeah, Yahoo! still exists. Who knew?) It does exactly the right thing–lets you select a list of theaters (I believe–I do use the Zipcode method), and then prints each theater, with each movie playing at the theater, with all showtimes for that movie. They will undoubtedly break it some time soon. [http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes-tickets/](http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes-tickets/) ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2011, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/27 "2011-05-11T16:35:59Z")
> [@Reno\_Nevada](#): > > I use the Yahoo! movie listing (yeah, Yahoo! still exists. Who knew?) It does exactly the right thing–lets you select a list of theaters (I believe–I do use the Zipcode method), and then prints each theater, with each movie playing at the theater, with all showtimes for that movie. > > They will undoubtedly break it some time soon. > > [http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes-tickets/](http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes-tickets/) I looked at the Yahoo listings. They look OK, but (and this is going to sound like whining) the single-column layout is much less appealing than the old IMDB listing. How do we make an appeal to a Google developer? If any hang out here, I’d love to beta test a revised Google Movies site. Add all the features that the boneheads who just ruined IMDB’s movie listings and add good new features: [ul] [li]Customized theater lists[/li][li]More than one column[/li][li]User controllable layout[/li][li]An Images on/off button[/li][/ul] Looking again at Google’s movie listings, just adding a customizable list of theaters associated with the Google account might get us most of the way there. I mean, I don’t own a car, so I really don’t care what is playing at the I-70 Drive-In. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2011, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819/28 "2011-06-07T17:06:06Z")
Update: IMDB sort of listened to the customers, but not really. They brought back [the option to list by Cinema](http://www.imdb.com/showtimes/cinemas/). But they don’t have MY carefully tended and pruned list of cinemas that I can actually get to. And, the list is still plagued with useless movie poster images. And, even worse, they are in a single column, sucking up as much paper as possible. Chicago’s River East 21, which used to fit comfortably on a single page, now sucks up 4 pages! The programmers at IMDB must really hate trees. Dear useless clods, Print Stylesheets have been part of the spec for for more than a decade! Learn them! Use them! Leave the fucking posters on the non-printable stylesheet! And bring back the two column layout on Print! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/imdb-ruined-their-theater-listings/580819.md?page=1)