I love Hollywood, I really do. But studios and theaters have screwed with me for the last time.
I’ve seen maybe four movies this year (including two I reviewed). Setting aside for a moment that the movies were generally pretty bad (or okay at best), I had to pay upwards of ten bucks to see them. Then, after that particular gouging, I had to sit through ten — 10 — commercials! A couple of them were moderately entertaining, but I really, really hate commercials. Being basically held captive and forced to watch them is just plain bad business practice.
And I can see it’s going to get a lot worse:
Domestic revenues at movie theaters may fall below $9 billion for the first time since 2001 after averaging $9.3 billion over the last three years. Factoring in higher admission prices, the number of tickets sold is expected to finish at about 1.4 billion, the lowest since 1997.
So revenues are tanking. How will they make that up? Charge more? I doubt it; people will stay away in droves if they do that. No, they’ll add more commercials. And as fewer people put up with that, and stay home to use Pay Per View or Netflix (and as TVs get better, that’s a pretty good option), that’s a vicious cycle.
So I’m done. I may still go when a movie is reviewable for my site, but that’s it. I have a DVD player. I can wait.
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I guess I’m lucky. Here in Birmingham, it only costs $5.75 or $6.00 to see a movie depending on which of the two nearby theaters I go to. Of course that’s matinee prices, I refuse to spend the $8 to see anything when I can save $2 and go earlier.
Plus, I recently saw King Kong and there wasn’t a single commerical of anykind. Just previews (which half the time I enjoy more than the movie I’m about to see).
Luckily, advertisers are wasting their money when they make me sit though commericals. Most of the time I can’t remember the name of the main character in the movie, let alone what kind of car was advertised 2 hours ago. And when I do remember, I have a very strict rule when it comes to advertising. If the commerical is good, that’s great, but I’m not going to buy something because of it. However if the commerical is bad enough (Old Navy, I’m talking to you), I refuse use that company’s products or services.
And let’s face it, a commerical taking up valuable preview time is automatically considered to be annoying at best.
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Here in Brisbane, Australia, a movie at one of the big chain cinemas costs about $14AU (about $10US), with all the commercials and such. However, we’re lucky in that one of the local cinema groups managed to get hold of the IMAX theatre when it went bust, and masked the screen down like a letterbox DVD. And they only charge about $7AU. And the fancy IMAX sound system is still installed. So at the moment, I’m looking forward to King Kong on the 25m (80ft) screen.
Commercials I use to get rid of my MST3K-induced habit of talking back at the screen. I figure no-one has paid to see the commercials, so they won’t mind if I heckle them. And it keeps me shut up during the “feature presentation”.
But I agree with Phil, this year’s crop was pretty terrible.
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:51 pm
On a tangent…
I saw “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” this weekend. I was seriously peeved as what I assumed was another stupid car comerical was being played (complete with one of the auto maker’s ‘Mr. Voice’). I about fell off my chair laughing when I discovered it was a “Cars” comercial (i.e. the new Pixar movie).
January 3rd, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Yeah, with a family of 4 (well, three of us usually since my daughter moved out, but we still often take her with…), we often wait for movies to come to the cheap theaters. The movies we really “must see” in first run, we often catch in matenee’s. We used to go to the drive through too. And the movies we really like, we buy the DVDs for anyway. The days of my seeing The Empire Strikes Back 33 times in first run are very long past….
But what really bugs me about movies these days, even more than the price of admission, is the really lousy attention film makers pay to scientific accuracy. It’s hard for my family to sit through a movie with me while I’m laughing and guffawing through it, pointing out the ludicrous at a rate that often seems to exceed the framerate of the film…..
Jim.
January 3rd, 2006 at 6:24 pm
I have to agree. Not much hacks me off more than to PAY to see commercials. I’m noticing there are commercials coming on DVDs now, although so far, I haven’t found any that couldn’t be skipped with the Menu button.
I went to the theatre over 100 times in 1997. In 2005, I went 4 times.
January 3rd, 2006 at 7:27 pm
I do think that the creation of that hot product microwavable popcorn put the Movie Theater on notice years ago.
Giant Cinema complexs used to be social gathering places for the bored consumer. Multi-tasking has arrived. People don’t just watch one huge silver screen anymore. There are plasma, LCD, gameboy, cell-phone, puter screens that are all running at the same exact time.
Moreover, the storylines of todays films are thin. One could get fatter by popping up another bag of popcorn in the microwave….
January 3rd, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Aw, man.. Don’t get me started.
While I hate the fact that I need to put up with the commercials on the screen before the movie begins playing, and the commercials during the ‘pre-show countdown’ (including the requiste dumb-and-getting-dumber Movietickets .com commercial), and the genuine suckiness of movies these days, the thing that I hate the most is the talkers.
Ooh – how I despise them. I’ve paid the overpriced admission. I’ve bought the greasy popcorn that comes in containers advertising heart surgeons. I’ve endured the commercials. And the one time that we are SUPPOSED to be quiet and focus on a story, I invariably have someone chatting away about how cute the actor is or why isn’t Stacy going out with Brian anymore or some other thing. Bonus points if they have to ask what’s going on in the film because they’ve missed it.
I’m actually to the point where I get – and I know this is to the stage of being unhealthy – stressed out before a movie because I am dreading the inevitable chatterbox that will wreck the experience. This sometimes taints the experience itself.
I vow that someday, I will build a room in my house that will be soundproofed, light-proofed and cell-phone scrambled for my movie watching. Only I or a very carefully screened group of non-movie-interupting people will be allowed in. And my wife is already on the blacklist.
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Besides the horrible commercials, and outrageous prices, movies are just plain terrible. What the Movie industry does not want to acknowledge is the poor state of the movies they are cranking out. Naturally, a balance will be reached, between outrageous prices, commercials, etc, and those driven to absolutely see the movie while it’s first out at theatres.
For every jewel that is released, we are swamped with thousands of clones, that are so much worse. Movies will always remain a dominant form of entertainment, but except for rare occasions, (such as hitchiker’s being relieased), things are much better at home.
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:35 pm
There are a ton of good even great movies out there. The problem is no one is going to see them in the theatre and Hollywood says “I told you so.” So they make them dumber, bigger and less imaginative.
Hollywood ties up all the distribution and theatres so badly that there isn’t more room for quality pics like Squid and the Whale, Capote and The Constant Gardner, films I’m more than happy I paid $10 to see. These figures overlook these movies and the per-screen averages are more than double all the Fantastic Fours and Stealths out there.
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:46 pm
“I’ve seen maybe four movies this year”
Considering it’s only January, you might want to slow down…
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Oh yeah. Comercials at movie theaters drove me away long ago. I went to see Lord of the Rings because I had to go again and again, but most movies are really bad and getting to the movies early to get a good seat, paying all that money and then sitting through ear-blasting previews (which are commercials) and other commercials makes me ill.
I pay for HBO etal on demand and watch everything commerical free except the Simpsons and the history channel.
“I’m noticing there are commercials coming on DVDs now, although so far, I haven’t found any that couldn’t be skipped with the Menu button.
”
KIDS dvds have commericals that can’t be skipped……sick I say.
January 3rd, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Kevin from NYC beat me to it: kids’ dvd’s have ‘unskippable’ commercials. Annoying and sick.
I, too, have gotten to the point where I’ll wait for a film to come out on dvd, rather than going to the local cinema. There are a few flicks I’d like to see on the big screen, but usually the cost & time (or lack of time) mean I’ll wait the few months or so to just buy a dvd & watch it at my leisure.
By the way, does anyone else notice the ‘Skittle dropper’ at any local movie place? You know, that’s the dip who sits in the last row and drops an open box of Skittles on the floor, causing the round candies to, well, skittle down the sloped floor all the way to the front row. For many years, it seemed that there was always a Skittle dropper at every movie I went to see, regardless of what city I was in.
January 4th, 2006 at 12:14 am
I think that it is great that the movie companies blame movie downloaders for their decline in revenues, when they insist on making crappy movies and charging us obscine amounts of money to watch the crappy commercials and the crappy movies, but also to buy their foods (which is easily solved by a trip to ‘Hot Topic’ to buy those $40 extremely baggy pants with an insane amount of pockets.)
I must say, that I am seeing more movies now than I did in the past few years, but that is more due to my ability to travel to the theatres without being tethered to my parents.
January 4th, 2006 at 2:04 am
I live up north in Iceland, and here we have to pay the hefty price of nearly $13 (800 isk) for the ticket. And we have to sit through commercials as well. And trailers. And moviegoers here are extremely rude, using their cellphones during the movies (especially teenagers). Happens at least once during each movie I go see. And most of the movies (90%?) available in theaters I wouldn’t want to see even if they were free.
No, it’s no wonder they are not making as much money as they used to. The wonder is why they are making this much money.
January 4th, 2006 at 3:20 am
I live in Germany and you pay around 5-12 Euro (6-14$) for a movie, depending on the time and the theater. Luckily you can make reservations, so I always arrive deliberately late because there’s about 30 minutes of commercials, not counting the previews which I enjoy. But given that I pay only 3,50 Euro for a rent DVD or even 1,50 at the library for a reservation, a movie has to interest me very much before I want to see it on the big screen.
@Woo: Take me with you when you go see a movie next time. I am known to shut up any chatterboxes in movies pretty efficiently. Perhaps it’s the fact that they cannot stand having a small, slender woman yelling at them at the top of her voice (so happened in Star Wars I-III)
January 4th, 2006 at 4:46 am
Here in Flanders a ticket costs around 7-8 euro, a bit more if it is a long movie (like Lord of the Rings).
You can also buy a package of 10 tickets (which you can use throughout the year) for 54 euro.
There are usually commercials and trailers of new movies before the movie, never during the movie.
At most the movie may be interrupted for a ten minute break, but only it the movie is over 2 hours long.
Luckily people are relatively disciplined – so no mobile phones ringing and not too much interference from popcorn divulging people…
January 4th, 2006 at 6:26 am
I agree ticket prices are outrageous, Espescially if you don’t go to a matinee show. Here in MA there is one theater that is $9 if it’s not a matinee show.
And Hollywood wonders why theater attendance is down, make some better movies and lower prices and we’ll go.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:26 am
quality pics like Squid and the Whale
Ok, I want to see that one now.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:32 am
The last film I went to see was March of the Penguins at an art house cinema and luckily the other people in my row were adults actually interested in the movie.
The ticket price was £5.00
One of my complaints about the British Cinema scene here, is that MOTP was reported as a surprise blockbuster and none of the major chains showed it. I had to go to an arthouse cinema to see it, where of necessity they have to charge more than a major chain.
My other gripe is with other film goers, especially those with Children.
When Phantom menace came out, I was instructed where to sit by the usher. In that row was an women with her little children, who were more interested in running races. So I had to :
get up and sit down,
get up and sit down,
get up and sit down,
get up and sit down,
get up and sit down,
get up and sit down,
etc.
Not fun when you have a full bladder. I almost walked out of the cinema.
January 4th, 2006 at 8:16 am
When I was a young man, the town where my parents lived passed a by-law that forbade children under 14 from movie theatres, regardless of the rating of the movie, for the last showing each day.
Those city councillors are worthy of worship.
I don’t know if the by-law has held to this day, but I do know that it made it great to visit my parents when on leave, and be able to watch in peace Star Trek movies or other things that attract a lot of kids.
The funny thing is, so many people with children think you’re a troll if you stand up to their children. At Revenge of the Sith, the brat in the row behind me kicked my seat for a good half an hour. After repeated requests to control her little minion, I finally told his mother that I would get an usher and have him ejected if it didn’t stop right now. Oddly enough, it stopped. After the movie, the mother gave me the stare of ultimate death.
I could go on a huge rant about children in public and how they’re getting worse, and it’s OUR fault because they’re OUR kids. We all got taught about manners in public places, why can’t we teach our kids? That’s a royal we and royal our… I don’t have children so I just have to put up with other people’s uncontrolled hellions and try desperately to keep a happy face.
January 4th, 2006 at 8:33 am
While I whole-heartedly agree regarding the inconveniences of the theater-going experience (especially relative to the ticket price), I think that we should maybe think critically about this concept of a box-office slump.
It is in Hollywood’s interest to promote the concept of a “slump”, allowing woe-is-me hand-wringing and gloomy spectres of increased ticket prices and decreased production rates of movies. However, the figures quoted in the AOL, while generally accurate, are somewhat specious nevertheless.
True, ticket receipts for 2005 “may” drop below 9 billion, but they are not likely to. Remember that the opening date of a film is what matters for its box office accounting. So, for instance, Meet the Fockers, the 4th highest grossing film of 2004, gets all $280 million of its box office credited to 2004, even though it opened on 12/22 and didn’t close until the next June. The 2005 box office is already 8.9 billion. Anyone doubt that King Kong and Narnia are going to push the number over 9?
Further, 2004’s record $9.4B was partially fueled by The Passion of the Christ’s $370 million. Passion brought unusually large numbers of moviegoers into theaters who normally do not attend films. Interestingly, the AOL article you cite as a source acknowledges this, but only as a point made by “Hollywood apologists.” I’ve never really considered myself one of those before. I do tend to question articles that only acknowledge counterpoints within a pejorative phrase. At any rate, if you change Passion from a special interest mega blockbuster to a run-of-the-mill, ordinary blockbuster that did, say, $100M, then suddenly you find that 2004’s box office drops to $9.1B. 2003’s was $9.1B. 2002’s was $9.1B. 2005 will probably be $9.1B. Where’s the slump?
By the way, http://www.boxofficemojo.com was my source for the box office figures.
January 4th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Welcome to the club BA!
It is not only the ticket prices. It is the price of popcorn and any and all concessions. I’m suprised they haven’t begun charging for restroom use!
It is the fellow moviegoers who can also be annoying. Cell phones! Talking. Kicking seats! Standing up and walking in front of you during the movie. etc.
I have surround sound at home and a relatively large screen. I can get
a SMALL amount of popcorn, and it’ll cost me a couple of cents. (And it’ll
be fresh!) I have a comfy couch. It’ll take an awfully good movie to get me to a theater!
January 4th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I only went to see 2 movies in 2005.
The remake of “The Longest Yard” (couldn’t pass it up… it was at a newly renovated drive-in theatre) and “Hitchhiker’s Guide” (how could I NOT see that one on the big screeen?).
In 2004, I think that “Jersey Girl” (big Kevin Smith fan) and “The Manchurian Candidate” were the only ones that I saw.
I pay way too much for cable as it is. I don’t need to put out more money so that I can be annoyed by strange people in the dark. I can stay home for that.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:23 am
I’ve been reading these responses and I continue to see the same reasons given for why people are no longer enjoying the theatrical experience as they used to. The thing is, it really isn’t to do with the quality of movies (there actually are a hell of a lot of excellent movies in release right now, they just aren’t being promoted well enough to make their existence known to you), but all of the extraneous distractions that have nothing to do with the movie at all: rude patrons, ads, the expense. A couple going out to a night at the movies is spending a minimum of $18-$20, and then more piles on if they eat, or if they’re the kinds of considerate people who’d get a babysitter rather than drag their squalling rugrat to an R-rated film.
Shameless plug time: Interested folks may find articles worth reading about cinema and shifting tastes in viewer habits over at my blog.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Keep in mind that Hollywood and movie theaters are seperate entities. When you walk into a movie theater you are not entering an embassy from Hollywood. You are walking into a business which must pay Hollywood to show their crappy movies. The ‘honor’ of being allowed to show Hollywood’s movies comes at a steep price too.
Movie theaters make very little profit off the ticket sale. In some cases the theater takes a loss here. As a business the theaters have overhead to pay for as well (electricity, employee pay, etc.). A business is in the business of making money. The theaters don’t exist to entertain us while they lose money. The majority of theater profit is actually in the sale of concessions, that 4.50 USD bottle of water, the 5.50 USD tub of popcorn…
I think movie theaters are doomed not because of poor movies. I believe poor movies have always been out there. The horribleness may be different in degree but I think the overall rate of poor movies is the same as it was 30 years ago. Movie theaters are in trouble because their business model is under threat from more and more viable competetion. Some of that competition is Hollywood itself (HBO, DVD sales three months later…). The theater must make money. Once it stops making money it ceases to exist. This is why there are commercials, more markup on popcorn, etc…
Going to the theater is no longer just something to do for my wife and I. Now that I’m not dating her anymore we go to only a select few movies at the theater (LOTR, Serenity and a few chick flicks for her). We find renting/buying DVDs to be cheaper and more convenient than going to the movie. On-Demand viewing has recently become available to us and this looks cool.
Eventually, I think the movie theater will go the way as the drive-in movie theater.
January 4th, 2006 at 10:37 am
I don’t entirely agree with your final analysis, Eugene, if only that the death of cinemas has been foretold ever since the rise of VHS in the early 80’s. Of course, now, home viewing trends ARE stronger and preferred by more and more of the public. But then, this year we’ve had another 6-8 films top $200 million atthe box office, which means there are certainly some films where people cherish the theatrical experience still.
What’s been overlooked in this discussion is the interesting rise of what you might call “boutique” theaters, a return to the old “movie palace” concept where people can view a movie in a spacious and very movie-friendly environment, even eat dinner in a full restaurant/bar. These are theaters expressly not catering to the Joe Sixpack crowd. Here in Austin we have the Alamo Drafthouse chain, privately owned by real movie fanatics. They have both first-run and special screenings, a full menu (wait staff brings you your meal right there at your seat), no SUV ads before the movies (instead they show cool, obscure stuff entirely at random), and best of all, little rules like NO CHILDREN! They do a hopping business.
What I think you’ll see is the waning of the teen-centric mall multiplex, while theater concepts similar to this one, for the real movie disciple, grow. It’ll mean actually leaving your house to go OUT to a movie will become more of a special and occasional event, like a rock concert, but it will never die completely. No matter how good your home theater is, you have to go a long way before matching the splendor of seeing a fine 35 MM print on an 80 foot screen.
Anyway, I talk about the on-demand viewing trend on — yes, yes — my blog!
January 4th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
drag their squalling rugrat to an R-rated film.
I’m serious when I say that I have overheard a couple whining to get a refund because the Restricted (presumably what we’d now call 18A here, sort of like R in the USA) film they brought their 6ish-maybe-7 year old to had nudity and strong language.
WTF??
I didn’t hang around to see what happened. If there is cosmic justice, the theatre owner came out and slapped them both upside the head and chased them away. Sadly, they probably got their refund, then used it to pay for another month of Grand THeft Auto for their little precious or something.
Since big screen TVs have become relatively good in quality and reasonable in price, and since most movies don’t really require a theatre experience (a big space flick or a big landscape film? absolutely. 4 weddings and a funeral? Most comedies, kids movies, chick flicks, non-landscape dramas, sports movies, yadda yadda… Certainly not.), it really is more cost effective to rent or buy the disk and stay home and make rare pilgrammages out to the old altar for those special films.
This wasn’t the case 20 years ago at the peak of the VHS era when a big TV was out of reach of most people, VHS quality was crappy (still is I suppose) and you could still get into a theatre for less than the price of a beer. It was worth it just to get out of the house.
January 4th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Pretending I’m on AOL, I suppose I could gross-quote the entire foregoing and append a “Me,too!”, but instead I want to add that ads have laregly driven me away from theatre, and moreso, have caused me to invest in two DVRs to replace two of my VCRs (I kept one VCR for hockey broadcasts). The DVRs allow me to record the programmes that I watch regularly *and* skip the commercials instantly. No I *don’t* watch a lot of TV, but many things run concurrently, so I have to have at least three independent recording systems available. Anyway the TV commercials are so appalling nowadays that I don’t even watch them. I’m sure I am missing a few gems, but I’m willing to let them go so as not to have my intelligence insulted by the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) method of advertsing. Did you know that TV advertisements are targeted at adults with no more than a grade 7 (Form 7) education? Gads! People that don’t get upset by that probably DESERVE to watch commercials.
January 4th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Evolving Squid, I’m with you all the way.
In the last few years, I’ve had several movies ruined by children. Usually 12-14-year-olds in a 15-rated movie. At one time, I got a round of applause for saying to one of them “either shut up or get out of here”. She didn’t, so I had to get the staff to remove her. It still spoiled the film for me, though.
It seems to me that UK cinemas really don’t care about enforcing the 15 rating, as long as the money comes in.
Eugene – yes, the cinemas are only trying to make a profit, but it’s the Hollywood studios that dictate how much a cinema has to pay to rent a print of the film. And often dictates for how long the cinema has to rent it. In the UK, many small cinemas went bust because the big studios did things like slap a 10-week minimum rental period on a new film. If a cinema only has three screens, they can’t afford to tie up their resources that way for such a long time. Consequently, the smaller cinemas couldn’t show films when they first came out.
January 4th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Wow… hit a nerve there, Phil.
January 4th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
OK, Poor quality movies, rude people, making us pay to see commercials, bad over priced food…, yet people still go!
I go to movies for escapism, not some director or actors flavor of the month political views.
Hollywood is bringing themselves down, way overpaid clueless (about everything) actors, and the all the rest of the overpaid movie industry, no imagination writers. BAD science… on, and on,and on…
January 4th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
BA said, “I love Hollywood”
Why? It’s a cesspool of corruption and a place where good ideas go to die. There’s hundreds of behind the scenes accounts of movie developments posted online. Read a dozen and you’ll get to the point where I am: I praise the rise of technology that gives power to the independent filmmaker, and can’t wait for the Hollywood studios to die ignoble deaths. Eff Hollywood. Eff the stuck up celebrities and the drug addled executives and egos and all of it.
Read about how Wild Wild West only had a giant mechanical spider in it because some moron executive wanted a giant spider in a movie, any movie. Read about how great scripts were raped into money-losing grabage by MBAs without an ounce of creativity in their entire family trees. Read about how XMen 3 is being intentionally monkeywrenched because the new studio head doesn’t like superhero movies.
January 4th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
I know some people in Hollywood, and I liek them quite a bit. The system is seriously flawed, obviously, but there are lots of talented people there. Also, there are a great many very good movies that do come out (we watched Dodgeball again the other night and it slays me every time), which was why I started off with that caveat.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
I usually use the automatic ticket machine and purchase a children’s ticket. I bring a couple of beers and some chips from home in my knapsack. Cuts the price down a lot.
January 5th, 2006 at 5:40 am
One of the little sub-threads in this is the overall future of advertising. As consumers, we’re seeing it become more intrusive: in the DVDs we buy, on cinema screens, on the back of every bench in public, 1 hour TV shows that are actually about 40 minutes of content, etc. It’s getting worse, and strangely enough it’s because we’re getting better at ignoring ads.
TV advertising has become measurably less effective because even if you don’t have a DVR, you usually have a mute button and a 6-pack in the fridge or some equivalent. Fewer and fewer people watch commercials. On DVDs that have to make them unskippable in the software or people just skip them… the result? DVD players change their software so things can’t be unskippable (seriously!) and DVD makers change theirs to overcome the players. It’s been shown that people will stare at their cursor while a web page loads rather than read banner ads.
The only defence advertising seems to use is to become more intrusive. INUNDATE people with ads and they’ll HAVE to look at them, even if only by accident.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:03 am
I wonder if films like “Primer”, which was only released on DVD, will become more common. It was an extremely good movie — as good as almost anything that hit the theatres in the last 5 years — and was made on a shoestring. Amazing what good writing and a brilliant, well thought out concept can do for a film.
Btw, Phil, are you a Firefly/Serenity fan? I would think that it would appeal to many astronomy enthusiasts, if only because the action in space is silent. Quite a commitment to reality, and adds an astounding drama and tension to many scenes.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:19 am
In Denmark, where I grew up, we did not have ads on TV until well into the 80’s. So going to the cinema and see ads was kinda fun. After we got ads on TV and also living abroad with way too many ads on TV, I am totally cured.
I find it insulting to go to the cinema, pay the tickets, buy popcorn and a coke (I would never frequent a cinema that serves Pepsi), find that I have used all the money I had in my wallet and then spend 20 minutes watching ads.
It’s much cheaper to buy the DVD than two people going to the cinema, not to mention the savings if you only rent it.
If I was stuck on a deserted island with just a home theatre and a power generator and I was asked to pick just one movie to bring along, I would bring Groundhog Day.
I find it very ironic that it’s one of those movies you can watch again and again and again…….
January 5th, 2006 at 9:23 am
M@, you should check the link below
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/01/01/willy-wonka/
January 5th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Thomas Siefert said:
“If I was stuck on a deserted island with just a home theatre and a power generator and I was asked to pick just one movie to bring along, I would bring Groundhog Day.
I find it very ironic that it’s one of those movies you can watch again and again and again……. ”
That’s weird. I got this strange feeling I’ve read that before …
January 5th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Nigel Depledge said:
“That’s weird. I got this strange feeling I’ve read that before …”
uh oh… something must have been inserted in the matrix….
January 5th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Yeah, I’ve given up on regular movies too. The commercials at the beginning was my final straw too. It helps that I got a big TV after my old one died though.
January 5th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Thomas,
Ack! I just subscribed to the blog today, and I tried to catch up with Bloglines… which didn’t display pics, so I didn’t catch the bit about Serenity… and then I checked the reviews and it wasn’t there…
So. Now I’m caught up. And I’m very satisfied to see the positive reviews. We just got our copy of the DVD for xmas (but fullscreen! why!? WHY?!?) and I’m all psyched about it again.
January 7th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Man, you said it!
I quit movies about 18 months ago.
It is just too expensive for casual pleasure. After spending an arm and a leg getting in and getting popcorn and a coke you get to enjoy 5 or 10 minutes of commercials???
No Thanks! I’ll wait for the DVD.
Darin
January 8th, 2006 at 9:38 am
Personally I think the intrusion of commercials into the lead off is a reflex from the theaters to declining revenue. They’ve finally gotten it into their heads that an audience that spends more on DVDs than tickets isn’t going to shell out more money to see a movie away from home, their only recourse has been to open up advertising for income.
What will eventually happen is the older crowd (don’t shoot, I’m one of them) who hates this kind of thing will eventually abandon the theaters, and younger folks who have grown up in a world where information overload is a normal thing, will learn to detune the noise and sit impatiently, like us old codgers did in the quiet dark of years past, and wait for the bloody movie to get underway already.
As much as we might bark, that’s kinda the way of things. Those of us who remember how it used to be are no longer the target audience, so our concerns matter less and less to advertisers and presenters as each year passes. Kids are coming of age in a time when quiet time comes only when something’s gone wrong, like the cable’s screwed up, the projection room has a problem, or the power goes out. Silence and contemplation are almost alien to them, and those businesses that want their money are adapting.
Oh, brave new word, eh?
January 9th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Along the same path, what about commercials on DVDs? I really can’t stand it when I *buy* a DVD and discover it full of promos. I can understand when a DVD that you rent has promos on it, but not the ones I own.
January 10th, 2006 at 11:24 am
While we’re venting about movie theaters, how about the lack of intermissions? Every time I’ve asked, I’ve been told that the theaters insist that there be no intermission. Of course, because of this the theater where I went to see “Return of the King” lost two concession sales: I wasn’t going to buy a drink right before a three-hour movie, and since there was no intermission I didn’t slip out to go to the bathroom and get a refill.