That’s what my wife and I were subjected to last night at the Broadway Theatre before a showing of
District 9
, beating the previous record (in my personal experience) of seven commercials. That doesn’t count the slideshow-style commercials that precede the darkened theater, big-budget Coke and Army ads. The movie start time was listed at 6:40 p.m. I checked my watch right after the Coming Attractions self-promo reel; it was after 7.
The Cinema Advertising Council, a trade organization repping 82 percent of U.S. screens,
brags
that revenue for theater ads has seen double-digit growth over the last five years, equating to just shy of $540 million in 2007. It really works well, they say, because, “The cinema audience is unique in that it is attentive [and] engaged… .” Hmm, could that be because we’re
fucking captive
?
Apparently, I’m in the minority for finding this manner of advertising rude if not immoral. Last year,
Variety reported
that most moviegoers don’t mind the ads. Well, I do. And so do the folks at
CMPAA
, the Captive Motion Picture Audience of America, who suggest ways to fight back. The best one, in my opinion, is contacting the theater companies, which often have a monopoly on local markets. Here’s the “
Contact Us
” page for Coming Attractions Theatres, which owns all the first-run theaters ’round here except the Fortuna.
This article appears in Eight Days at the Races.
I don’t even go to first run theaters anymore. They’re too expensive and yes, the commercials are unacceptable.
I wouldn’t mind the commercials if it was proven to me that they are necessary to keep the theater afloat. You know, like a newspaper running ads on its front page or a weekly devoting a whole issue to a holiday gift guide. cough
But theaters were displaying screen ads well before the Internet went mainstream, so it smacks of milking a captive audience… not that theaters aren’t hurting these days.