AMC now warns moviegoers to expect ‘25-30 minutes’ of ads and trailers - "Will this help us sell more tickets?"

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AMC Theatres is making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening and avoid sitting through lengthy ads. A new notice has started appearing when people purchase tickets via the AMC website, warning that “movies start 25-30 minutes after showtime.”

This already mirrors the estimated runtime of AMC’s preshow content, which includes ads and trailers, but now customers will be better informed if they want to arrive a little later without missing the start of their movie. This small change also tracks with a report made by The Hollywood Reporter last week that said AMC will soon start “addressing the preshow on its ticketing platforms.”
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Starting today, AMC will also show more ads than before, meaning its preshow lineup may have to be reconfigured to avoid exceeding the 30-minute mark. The company made an agreement with the National CineMedia ad network that includes as much as five minutes of commercials shown “after a movie’s official start time,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, and an additional 30-to-60-second “Platinum Spot” that plays before the last one or two trailers.

AMC was the only major theater chain to reject the National CineMedia ad spot when it was pitched in 2019, telling Bloomberg at the time that it believed “US moviegoers would react quite negatively.” Now struggling financially amid an overall decline in movie theater attendance and box-office grosses, AMC has reversed course, telling The Hollywood Reporter that its competitors “have fully participated for more than five years without any direct impact to their attendance.”
 
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REGENDarySumanai said:
I'll take my chances with a VPN and a torrenting client instead.
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Yo ho Yo ho the pirate's life for me!

Old King Koaleamos said:
This is how you revive piracy.
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Already started when everyone in hollywood decided to take their content off netflix and start their own platform. With hookers and blackjack their own exclusives. Not that the new content is any good. But some older stuff is only on certain streaming sites.

Thank god for piracy and dvd/bluray releases.
 
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20 minutes has been the standard runtime of trailers for at least this entire millenium. Back when I used to go to movies often it was well known that you could get there up to 20 minutes late provided it wasnt going to be a big enough movie you needed to vie for a good seat.

Frankly I'm not surprised, now that everyone has air conditioning and movie capable devices at the house this is just the kind of thing theaters will need to do to delay their inevitable extinction.
 
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I know this isn't great... but given the hustle and bustle of getting to the theater, using the bathroom, getting consessions, and settling in, is this really such an outrage?

That's if they factor these ads nobody wants to watch into the movie showtimes, I mean. Or if they're predictable enough you, as the audience, can figure them into your planning.
 
It's a shame, because I actually do like going the cinema. There has however been a noticeable downturn in the good type of people going there. Used to be that very few people talked during it, now - I assume because other decent people that don't like chatting in the cinema have stopped going - you get a lot of retards loudly talking or making faggoty reaction noises during showings.
 
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Most Wanted Banana said:
It can only get worse.

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This reminds me of Robert Rankin's absurdist Sci-Fi novel Armageddon: The Musical. In the future the masses earn credits for food, healthcare, etc. by watching television and all TVs have a little camera on the top to check you're watching. The hero of the novel is a dude who is able to sleep with his eyes open, and thus always has spare credits for medications and rations and is able to skip all the government "entertainment" and so is smarter than everyone else.

Anyway, last time I went to the cinema I deliberately went twenty minutes late (which is hard for someone as OCD as I am) in order to skip the ads and found I was still subject to another 15 minutes of them. At least that was the last time I went to a chain cinema. There's a local independent one I'll still go to.
 
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When's the last time something you liked didn't get shittier and more expensive? I have to bag my own groceries now, pump my own gas, watch half an hour of ads at the theater, and a Big Mac tastes like someone steamrolled a dick and boiled it. All of these things are like 100-200% more expensive as they were in 2000, despite inflation being somewhere around 2% per year. Somehow, a six figure salary is just as elusive now as it was then, and is still considered the threshold for having "made it".

Stupid gay robot future...
 
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Drive in movie chads keep winning. I watched 28 years later at the drive in with my woman, it was a kino experience. Also we didn't have twenty five minutes of trailers, we had maybe four or five minutes at most.
 
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With the whole West really going for the whole 'Eat Ze Bugs, Own Nothing,'... Piracy is ultimately the answer.


Fun fact, Pirates did more than just raid ships for supplies and treasures. They also set up all kinds of illegal businesses as well.

LaxerBRO said:
Video version:
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...I miss the old version of this. Felt more authentic to History.

Curzon Dax-sama said:
You know, I am wondering why they never attempted to sneak in ads on physical media.
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Back then, the ads were something you can view on the menu as a form of trailers or general advertisement of what the Studio is producing as well.
 
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UsedUp said:
Coming from a Canadian but do you have loyalty cards you can opt into via a debit or Mastercard where you can rack up points you can use at.your theatres? With have Scene here that's partnered with Scotia Bank so you can rack up points to use at movie theaters or a money off at a couple different restaurants and grocery stores. I haven't been to the movies in ages but we also use to have cheap nights on Tuesdays but since our local theatre upgraded to cineplex years ago so now it's all ULRLTRAAVX and imax and D-box etc so I'm curious if there's any incentive for you guys to go the movies?
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If we do, they're not top-billed as a major feature of any card I use or am aware of, so they're effectively non-existent if they are down here.

The majority of theaters are settling for licensing/bringing back old classics that are cheap to show/know will get sales, like Back To The Future, holiday titles like Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas, etc. Also tieing in Bollywood stuff I don't recognize, and anime movies.

I Hate The Disabled said:
I enjoy movie trailers.
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We have movie trailers at home. We can choose to watch them whenever we want.
 
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William Murderface said:
Most people don't know that one of cable TV's original selling points was the lack of commercials. Then they started slowly adding them in until you're paying to watch a show for 2/3 of an hour and the remaining 1/3 was just ads.
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All of the streaming services I currently have are free to me by perfectly legal means (credit card offer, free through an ISP). I keep wondering if it's worth it to get live services, but then I remember how many commercials I have to put up with on the services I have now and I remember why I cut the cord five years ago in the first place.

If you must know: creepy COVID commercials about how "brave" it is to stay home.
Chunky Salsa said:
you get a lot of retards loudly talking or making faggoty reaction noises during showings.
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Those faggots have invaded the theater, too.

I was at a showing of Porgy and Bess not too long ago, and, while it's not like you couldn't have read a synopsis online or in the fucking program, you got absolute faggots shouting "Oh no!" when

Crown pulls a knife on Porgy as if somehow it wasn't inevitable that one of the two main villains fighting for control of Bess would do something like that, and Porgy is kind of an idiot for getting himself involved with her in the first place, but he's a cripple, so I guess he's going to take what he can get, even if she is a drug-addled ho. Then after Porgy gets taken in after the cops need to arrest someone for Crown being murdered, Sportin' Life lures Bess out with drugs and she goes with him to New York, and the crowd gasped like irretrievable faggots after she takes his drugs and enthusiastically leaves with him. Porgy then goes to New York to find Bess, which is where the story ends, as if he wasn't singing about being happy about having nothing at the beginning of the story.

You're at a fucking opera, for fuck's sake. Fucking act like you are at least a little cultured.
 
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