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.”

 

[Snekposter]

They also set up all kinds of illegal businesses as well.

Like say... selling bootlegs to people unable to get the originals?

 

[Loose Goose]

The service industries used to have a closely kept trade secret called "Don't piss off your paying customers." I guess their business models are great, their algos are a wonder to behold, they know much better about marketing than I do, but they have just forgotten this one weird trick every business used to know. I used to go to the movies regularly because they were a good place to spend an evening. It was just a regular habit. Then they started squeezing more money out of the experience, made everything more miserable, strated treating customers badly, and made the movies crap. Somewhere after the lockdowns ended, it dawned on me I wasn't missing movies at all, I was just going out of habit, and wasn't having a good time anymore.

It's not just movie theaters. I used to buy DVDs for movies I liked. They were a good format, and were worth owning for the various featurettes they crammed on them. Then they came up with Blu-Rays, which had better image quality, but treated you as a thief by default, made you watch through minutes of crap warning against piracy, and didn't even work properly on VLCplayer. You are a sucker if you buy them, because you have to go through all this annoyance if you are a paying customer. Message heard, I am no longer one, just pirate things like a normal person.

Somewhere down the line, a lot of service based businesses got it into their heads you actually owe them your money and they don't have to work hard for it because what are you going to do, stop watching movies?

 

[eDove]

Dude, I went to a theater in December the commercials went on for 27 minutes. I timed it. Isn't this the norm anyway? The majority of them weren't even movie related. Dystopian stuff.

 

[marvlouslie]

I haven't been to a movie theater since 2007. I will NEVER go back.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

what are you going to do, stop watching movies?

Pretty much, tbh. Going (out) to the movies used to be a basic, enjoyable thing to do semi-regularly for a low-effort bit of entertainment or when you couldn't think of something else. Now it's very expensive, even relative to income and other product inflation.

Spoiler: Numbers

Not long ago, teenagers and adults alike could go out to the movies on a date without breaking the bank.

Sure, things increase. But for movies, in just 5-6 years, the change is huge. In 2018/19the data I saw showed average ticket cost a bit above $9/ticket. At that time, based on inflation-adjusted data, ticket prices had been about the same for 30 years.

In 2025 the average price of a movie (I just checked) is $16.09/ticket.*

*There are often service fees as well. Popcorn and a coke (medium for each) is at least another $15 per person. So $50-60, $35-40 if you buy no food/drink). And if you want to do the old familiar "dinner and a movie," you'll likely be over $100, if not far over that. For a basic night out.

The raw numbers for movie tickets have gone up almost 78% in 5-6 years. Salaries, average wages and earnings, and minimum wage haven't seen that increase in the last 5 years, not by a long shot.

• Average household income in 2024 was around $62k, compared to around $47k in 2018, about a 32% increase.
• The Federal minimum wage in 2018 was $7.25, and the Federal minimum wage in 2025 is $7.25. State minimums vary from around $5 to $17.
• Average hourly wage in 2018 was about $11; in Feb 2025, it's $11.24, so flat; average hourly earnings (which factors in wages, bonus, commissions, tips, ot, etc.) were a little above $31 by most sources in May 2025 and were about $23.40 in May 2019, about 33% up.
• Even inflation overall is nowhere near that 78%. From 2019 to 2025, the total inflation rate is just north of 25%.

For movies at home, my personal experience. E is that there are so many sources that I a) have a zillion things to choose from it's hard to know what to bother with, and b) the effort to make sure I can get what I want from all those sources and sorting out the costs for each is enough to make me feel like it's not worth the time and botheration.

 

[Chapalapachapa]

i guess ill keep using my 4k hdr tv, my sound system and some 4k torrents on the shittiest possible usb then

 

[Myrtle the Turtle]

I went to see the new Mission Impossible movie recently. It was 20 minutes of the same 5 ads for products that have zero relevance for me.

Just make your own home movie theatre. Projectors are cheap. Get a cheap laptop, an SSD/HDD, Mullvad VPN and start torrenting. If you really want movie theatre popcorn, get a box of Gold Medal Flavacol from Amazon for $15, some coconut or canola oil and start popping.

 

[SCV]

YAR HAR DIDDLY DEE

 

[Positron]

At least the concessions are generous!

 

[Trimalchio]

Is it just me, or have movie trailers also become much worse in the last few years? They seem to go on forever and reveal far too much of the plot. They're so bad, they actually make me not want to see the movie.

 

[Baguette Child]

Is it just me, or have movie trailers also become much worse in the last few years? They seem to go on forever and reveal far too much of the plot. They're so bad, they actually make me not want to see the movie.

The ability to make a succinct, gripping trailer has been utterly lost by the industry. It used to be almost a creative endeavour in and of itself to get you interested in a film without giving away too much of the actual plot.

Now you'll end up seeing all the best parts of a given picture in the ad for it alone. I guess it's easier for them to just beat you over the head with a bulk quantity of footage as advertising in the hopes the name branding sticks in your subconscious.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

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...

1. Real Estate. The elites have decided to use real estate as an investment strategy and wealth safeguard, and by hoarding it, they can keep it out of the hands of the working class, thus stripping the poor of most of their power and security. Which leads to...

2. Vulture Capitalism, whereby companies buy up franchises and asset strip them, selling the land their buildings sit on, thus forcing the franchises to rent it instead. The Vulture Capitalists also force the franchises to take on a lot of debt, causing them to be more likely to fail if there's a downtown in business. These stressed franchises thus have to charge more money and shrinkflate like hell in order to deal with the debt.

3. Increased immigration means that there are more people demanding products to buy (and housing to buy/rent), and when the demand goes up for everything, so do the prices.

4. All companies are owned by a small number of mega-corporations, which can charge whatever they want and eliminate competition.

5. Companies have realized that people will continue to buy enshittified products, because the alternative is to grow one's own food and make one's own products, and, as of yet, most people would rather eat crap than lift a finger to do something that requires effort.

In honor of Independence Day, let us honor a true patriot. A man who saw the way companies were going, and threw his heart and soul into turning the tide:

 

[Town Drunk]

This is actually pretty based of AMC to be honest. Letting you know what time to arrive if you want to skip the ads. The few movies I watch in a cinema every year is such a gamble. Show up 15 minutes late, and still see ads, or miss the first five minutes of the movie.

Movie cinemas are the bitch of the movie industry. They only get to keep around 10% of the sales from the ticket for the first week IIRC. That's the reason food and drinks cost so much.

I'm sure they know that seeing 20 minutes of ads pisses off the few people still attending, and they want to stay open, so letting people know what time to show up to avoid those ads makes people happy.

The Hollywood faggots making them show 20 minutes of ads and promos will probably not be so appreciative.

 

[George Lucas]

Remember when trailers were actually exciting and not cookie cutter mashups with Inception thuds every two seconds? I know all you niggers went to the movies just to see the Prequel trailers.

 

[Father Karras]

You know, I am wondering why they never attempted to sneak in ads on physical media.

I had multiple dvds as a kid with multiple unskippable trailers every time you booted it

 

[No-Eyed Square Guy]

what are you going to do, stop watching movies?

The last movie I paid to see was Mulholland Drive, and none of my actual peers have spent a fucking cent since then.

However, everyone younger than me and my asshole Gen X friends is blowing full cable-bill $$$ on streaming services—and not watching anything. Just ads for things, so they can talk about them.

 

[Caesare]

And then after that we had this thing called Youtube, which didn't have any ads at all because it was just retards posting gay shit

I loved old Youtube back when people would post entire tv series and tons of good movies and they wouldn't get taken down immediately since it wasn't yet the completely mainstream, ad-filled hellhole that it is today.

And I can remember buying bootleg DVD sets from eBay with multiple seasons of tv shows back in the day. You could get a 9 season tv series for around $20 as opposed to paying 30 or 40 per season. You could of course torrent it and do it yourself for free, minus the price of the dvd-rw's if you wanted to watch them on your tv, but it was convenient and cheap if you didn't feel like going through the trouble.

Definitely wouldn't fly today but its amusing to think about how long this went on without any intervention from Hollywood lawyers..

I had multiple dvds as a kid with multiple unskippable trailers every time you booted it

I hated when companies all started doing that. For years, you could skip past every preview and FBI warning with a click of the remote.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Everything's just getting shittier, pricier, and filled with more unblockable ads.

Is it just me, or have movie trailers also become much worse in the last few years? They seem to go on forever and reveal far too much of the plot. They're so bad, they actually make me not want to see the movie.

There's actually bizarrely a few times in recent years where they made the trailers bad on purpose to sabotage a movie's release. Usually if the higher ups want it to fail so they can go with some new "cinematic universe reboot plan" like what happened with the newest transformers movie. I never got around to seeing it myself but literally everyone I know whether they fucking know shit about transformers or not liked it and every fucking time they would talk about how the trailers made them think it was going to be an incredibly shitty cashgrab of a kids movie.

 

[Wayfaring_$tranger]

Fuck I didn't know it was this bad everywhere else, our only movie theaters in town are locally owned, and the only ads that play are ads for local businesses in the 5 to 10 minutes of wait time before the film starts while the theater is filling up, and like two movie trailers before the film, this sounds so gay

 

[Overly Serious]

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Oh good. Someone else posted it. Everyone was sharing these more sophisticated and fancy stuff and I just had Lazytown stuck in my head.

The service industries used to have a closely kept trade secret called "Don't piss off your paying customers." I guess their business models are great, their algos are a wonder to behold, they know much better about marketing than I do, but they have just forgotten this one weird trick every business used to know

At some point they decided that with sufficient advertising, control over social media and bought and paid for YouTube reactors, instead of making what people want they could have people want what they make. Which they preferred.

It's had mixed results.

Is it just me, or have movie trailers also become much worse in the last few years? They seem to go on forever and reveal far too much of the plot. They're so bad, they actually make me not want to see the movie.

There are movies I have actually not seen that I would have otherwise due to the trailers. And I don't mean that the trailer made me think the movie would be bad. Usually I can guess if it will be bad beforehand. I mean because the trailer gave away the whole fucking thing and there was no longer a point to seeing it.