I went to see The Matrix in a theater recently (25th anniversary release I think) and they did the same thing. 10 minute pre-roll of some random person explaining scene by scene why the movie was so great.
I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing after they've already booked the tickets, went to the theater, overpaid for refreshments, and sat to watch it, but I considered it an absurd waste of time.
Also, even though I saw the movie in the theaters on opening week 25 years ago and probably 20+ other times since, it _still_ felt like a spoiler for me. I can't imagine that ever being fun, or interesting, or useful to anyone. I know what I came to see, and why, please just let me watch it.
That movie in particular I feel like if you didn't see in theaters at the time of release that a big part of the experience is completely lost on you. Literally audiences had never seen anything like it.
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.
I remember going in blind to the film and the first scene with Trinity completely blew everyone in the theater away. One of the greatest openers in action cinema history (if not the greatest)
Same with Transformers (2007). Audience was agog and cheering. But if you weren't there on the day, you'd never understand. The level of CGI dominance would come to be normal these days, but at the time it was unprecedented. I was lucky to see it opening weekend because it was a huge release (blew out Titanic's opening weekend). Nowadays it has the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect but at the time it was unbelievable.
I saw the band Failure live two years ago a few blocks from where I live. The lights went down shortly after we arrived and a video started playing on the projector wall at the back of the stage. It was a series of interview clips with musicians talking about the band we came to see: how transcendentally amazing Failure was, how incredible the sonic textures on "Fantastic Planet" were, how Ken Andrews is an unappreciated genius, etc. I thought that it would be interrupted after maybe 90 seconds by a loud guitar to kick the show off, but nope - we got to hear Hayley Williams and that Zonie vintner guy who sometimes sings for Tool gush about the band that we were waiting to see for _30 minutes straight_.
At one point I checked my receipt to make sure that we didn't accidentally get tickets to some sort of virtual experience or pre-release screening instead of a concert. The video eventually ended, the band came on, and they gave a great performance. I left feeling more confused than anything; the rest of the crowd's reaction ran the gamut from impassioned to dismissive.
If the art you're putting on display already has a cult following I don't see the need to drive the point home via these weird metatextual commentaries. I'm a weirdo that likes watching movies with crew commentary but I like to do that in my living room, not in a theater.
This reminds me of our VHS box set of the Star Wars trilogy, I believe the second release but before the first special edition. Each movie had a several minute interview with George Lucas *before* the movie. I eventually memorized the timestamp of each film but it was such a waste of time in the aggregate to fast forward through. If they had it at the end sure why not, but before??
Very loosely related: This is exactly how I feel about unskippable tutorials in videogames. I feel like it robs me of the fun when a game explains to me what to do and how.
A Lord of the Rings Extended Edition replay recently went through the theaters a couple of months ago, so I took my two sons, one of which had seen it already, one for which they were new movies.
To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.
No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.
How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.
It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.
Hoo-boy, had I gone I'd have missed the first 20 minutes of the movie. Since movies now have preassigned seats I generally aim for 15-20 minutes after the time on the ticket.
I took my kids to those as well. For Fellowship we took our time getting popcorn etc, not caring about missing previews… boy was I surprised when we walked in and it had already started.
Made sure to be early for The Two Towers so we did not miss the iconic opening scene. And to the point of the linked blog post… they ran several spoiler-filled ads before the movie started (to be clear: before the starting time, while people were filing into their seats).
> I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing
Because the target public of hollywood movies seems to be idiots. They bring the most money and have relatively low requirements on what constitutes a movie.
One could argue that if a movie is spoiled by someone talking about it, it not that great movie. A great movie is great even if you saw it a dozen times
I don't think that's right. Movies use all sorts of devices to engage their audience. And a lot of them rely on surprise. If they tell you what they're about to do just before you see it happen "for real" - the effect is obviously compromised.
For me the problem with spoilers is not about knowing what is going to happen. A spoiler primes me to be on the lookout for when the spoiled thing happens, and THAT is what most ruins the experience for me.
Of course a great movie can't fully rely on a plot-twist as it's central supporting structure, but it can be a nice spice that can get entirely muted by a spoiler.
I agree 100% with the author. I've seen Alien,but I haven't watched it for a long time. So if I go to see it in the cinema now, while I technically do know what's going to happen - it isn't completely fresh in my mind. So to be shown all the suspenseful, scary bits I'm about to watch, out of context, immediately before the film, is absolutely detrimental to the experience.
That was my experience. For the recent rerelease I took my kids to see it for the first time in the theater. And we were treated to 20 minutes of spoilers before the movie started. Thanks, jerks.
I had a similar experience when I popped in an old DVD of Star Wars (i.e. A New Hope) recently. If I recall correctly, there are some short clips and audio that play as part of the intro before you even get to the main menu, and it includes the famous John Williams theme. I hadn't seen the movie in ages, so I wanted to go in fresh, and this totally ruined the experience.
I had the opposite experience when I popped in another old DVD, this time Amadeus. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie. No DVD menu or previews at all. It just felt so good to go straight to the story.
Yes, a pet peeve of mine is when a DVD plays the movie's opening theme music when the menu is displayed. Why play music that you're going to hear again immediately as soon as the movie starts? Why not play some soothing music that comes midway through the film instead of the opening bombast? For a menu display?
I 100% believe those menus were made for TV walls at retailers. I tell you, the number of times I saw The Matrix DVD menu playing on a loop at a Wal-Mart.
I avoid trailers, even for the movies that I'm not going to see imminently.
Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
(Regarding deceitful, you might've seen amateur trailer cuts that, say, make a light comedy look like a dark thriller, but the professionals were doing that first. How would a director have cut this, if they were making a more marketable picture than was actually made?)
Similarly, I avoid seeing any reviews until either after I've watched the movie, or after I've started and am ready to abort it. I want to experience the storytelling, and also form my own impression, before someone spoils either for me.
I do often vet a title first by looking at its ratings pair on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ (RT), and occasionally I look at the one-sentence review summary blurb. Especially for streaming services in recent years, where the majority of the titles are either mediocre or poor.
(SPOILER ALERT: Though, vetting with RT won't always save you from a bad experience. The other night's evening wind-down light movie, I picked what looked like a generic Jason Statham film, IIRC without vetting. And around halfway in, I was horrified, when the formulaic gruff antihero's redemption-lite arc suddenly reversed, to a double-down of violent and unnecessary pure evil, upon some innocent child. Then I went to skim the RT's summaries of professional reviews, and even none of those summaries warned of this.)
I liked the way Netflix used to automatically start playing whatever show/movie you're hovering over in the app from the first scene. If the first 30-60 seconds pulled you in, you'd continue on to watch the full movie/show without actually clicking "Play" (which also fixed the mental burden of deciding what to watch, since "stop scrolling through options" resulted in automatically playing whatever you landed on).
They've since replaced that with auto-playing trailers which seems to be standard these days. I really like when they just auto-played the movie/show -- most movies/shows already set up the plot decently enough in the first 60-90 seconds (well enough to know whether you want to watch it) and of course that also resolves the "spoiler in trailer" issue.
> Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
This feels like a strange take to me. Trailers are just advertisements for movies, and ads have to both inform about a product and hype it up. Do you also feel spoiled when you see an ad for a new burger because you’ve lost the mystery of what the toppings are? Do you feel deceived because the burger isn’t actually 3 feet wide like it was on the billboard?
Burgers aren't supposed to have plot developments and surprises like stories. That comparison makes no sense to me.
I would feel deceived if the ad showed off a beef burger and I got chicken. Or if I got some kind of meal that's the correct size but has a burger portion only 4cm wide. Now, sometimes trailers avoid big chunks of genre in service of not spoiling things, and that's a gambit that can work out, but most movies are a consistent genre and if they're trying to hype up a tiny portion of the movie because the rest is boring then that's not good.
Time Trap (2017) is an excellent low budget sci-fi movie with a trailer that spoils the key plot elements. Had I watched the trailer before the movie, I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed Time Trap nearly as much.
It happened to me when I was reading a new edition of ”The Spoils of Poynton” by Henry James.
There was an essay in the beginning of the book that I started reading on inertia alone (yes, I know, I should have known better). In the first paragraph (maybe first sentence), it spoiled the dramatic ending.
Not only that, in the second paragraph it would give an interpretation of what that means. So I was robbed not only of the plot, but also of a interpretation of my own before reading it. I quit the book after those two paragraphs and never read it.
I am still mad at the introduction for “The Idiot” for spoiling as much as possible and analyzing every plot point or emotional moment and then bringing up the author’s life on top of that. I could only imagine anyone who willfully puts these before a work wishes that no one should feel joy from reading. I still overall liked the book, but it could have been so different. I’ve also decided to wait a while to digest books before looking deeper into others’ opinions, including the author’s.
This is super common in introductions for anything that might be called a classic.
If you prefer to go into a work cold and only consult outside help if e.g. something necessary about the setting is unfamiliar in a way that wasn’t intended, as I do, you have to skip those until you’re done.
Movies are even worse. It can be really hard to go in cold to any remotely-popular film, they splash so much advertising and promotion everywhere that gives things away, even if not exactly spoilers.
The issue is statistics. There are billions of blog posts and only a tiny fraction of them talk about content of story based media, and most of the ones which do so are prefacing spoilers or hiding them. Same on forums.
On the other hand 99% of all cinemas show spoilers of various severity before 99% of all movies. I've stopped watching movie trailers on streaming services a decade ago and the issue was severe even back then. Cinemas show the same or even longer trailers with spoilers for practically every movie in current season. It is rather offensive for me - to pay money to watch movie and get worse experience than pirates have.
The article isn't saying "don't talk about these old movies at all as it spoils them"; it is, instead, very explicit that this is about "the movie we are seated to see".
A sequence of connected events happening is practically the only major element of telling a story that they consistently have in good measure, so… yes?
Theme, characters that aren’t “cool quippy person” or “somewhat alien quippy person”, a message they not just set up but then commit to, use of action for anything other than spectacle, et c. Lots of story-things (to say nothing of film craft—score, scene-setting and shot choices) of other sorts they are weak on. Plot, they have.
[edit] and yeah, I’ve seen all of them except a few of the recent ones at least twice regardless. It’s fine to like things that are not, you know, great.
This happened recently for the screening of The Matrix for its 25th anniversary.
My partner had never seen it, and sure enough they spent almost ten minutes spoiling it with a pointless featurette featuring some unknown new star reminiscing about the movie.
Same thing happened to me. I had seen The Matrix countless times, but this was going to be my first rewatch in a few years and my first rewatch ever in theaters. Part of the reason I was going was to get that awesome feeling you get when seeing a perfectly-crafted scene "for the first time" on the big screen. That featurette was so silly. They just went scene by scene showing 5 seconds each of iconic scenes from the movie. Right before the actual movie was about to start. Ugh.
It’s got to be some phenomenon where people can’t understand obvious things. Fully expect some Reddit post with “It’s hinted that Anakin is Luke’s father”.
I think the publishers etc. have identified that audiences actually don’t get stuff unless browbeaten with it.
Hence movie featurettes with spoilers and book introductions that describe the plot.
They’re trying to hit a full 80% of the population and that means you have to go one standard deviation below mean IQ.
The subreddit /r/yourjokebutworse is a showcase of this phenomenon.
> don't want to sit through the credits for extras.
Then have an intermission whilst the credits roll. Serve ice cream and refreshments. Make it part of the experience. It'll be fun.
Or sell tickets separaly for the pre-feature and the main feature (or just publish times when each will start and have an intermission in between so if you want to just see the main feature you can without disrupting anyone who arrived early for the pre-featured).
You have no idea who has seen these films and who hasn't. Yes, sometimes I want to go and see an old film at the cinema because I never got a chance to see it there the first time around (Star Wars was a case in point back in 1997). But sometimes I just haven't seen it so I want to see it for the first time, unmolested by spoilers.
There are better and more creative ways that aren't a great deal of effort to implement to handle this than showing a bunch of spoilers before the film you're there to see.
I think the interview is filmed primarily for the ability to say it exists on marketing copy, thus hopefully sell more tickets. It offer something "new" that differentiates the cinema screening of an old movie from any of the alternative (legal or otherwise) ways of viewing it.
The interview itself? Probably doesn't matter. But for the people involved, it would suck to see no one viewing it.
I'd expect there would be plenty of people who would choose to view it. For "Alien" I'd expect a big chunk of the audience would be people who have only seen it on home media but became huge fans and have watched it many times. They would know every scene, so nothing in the pre-movie extras would be a spoiler for them.
Not necessarily. People often make purchase decisions based on overall feeling, versus specific, discrete benefits - they'll choose a "fuller experience" because it feels more complete, and then end up not bothering to go beyond the "basic package".
At my theater some people used to get nude too. RIP Rialto Theatre - to add insult to injury it’s a church now. Dr. Frank-N-Furter is rolling in his grave.
So, the first time I went to see it I was there by chance, because it was in an amusement park and I really didn't know the first thing about what I was getting into.
And yes, at the time I thought the people were being rude, especially when they where howling at the usherette.
Then I saw other performances online and felt like a complete tool :)
At the 25 year mark? A sizable part of the movie-going audience wasn't even born then.
(Looked for statistics on movie-goer demographics. Found this on Statistica: "In 2019, there were 5.5 million frequent moviegoers aged 60 or above, up from 6.6 million in the previous year."[1] They need to upgrade their LLM.)
Whenever I've seen theaters do this type of thing, they do it before the published show time. Related content first, then at the published show time trailers start, then a bit later the actual movie starts.
If you don't want spoilers, then you just don't go in until the published show time.
> and don't want to sit through the credits for extras
Everything's digital now, right? We have the technology to insert a featurette between the end of the movie and the credits without anyone having to go splice the film reels.
I absolutely disagree. As three article mentioned, a big draw of these screenings is for a person who watched and loved a film to take a friend or family member who hasn't yet.
Yes, the author has a good point in a vacuum, but used a bad example to highlight that point in practice. Even for the minority of the audience who hasn't seen the movie yet, they almost certainly know what happens due to cultural osmosis. Children are probably the only group who could potentially be spoiled and let's just say I don't think the rerelease of 40+ year old R rated movie is necessarily targeted at children.
Maybe an apochryphal story, but a famous orchestra conductor was talking to the players before a Mozart review show and had this to say:
"Look, I know that professionals like you have been playing this music since you were kids and don't find it very inspiring anymore. And I'll be honest, we do this material to sell tickets and make money for our other more challenging repertoire.
But if you're having trouble finding your passion for this show, please remember that it's a full house, so you can be sure that for some of those people, this will be the first time they hear this music.
And for others in the audience, it will be their last."
I've seen some movies not knowing anything about them by avoiding trailer (this being much easier in the 1990s...) Movies seems to work better that way.
Though it can be jarring: Eg. Silence of the Lambs or Leaving Las Vegas.
I heard once that this is because the creators of the trailers are separate entities from the movie studio. Their job is to sell the movie. They don't care if they have to spoil the whole movie to get you to buy a ticket to see it.
I can usually tell within the first third of a trailer whether I'd like to watch it. In those cases I don't finish the trailer. They give everything away.
Yeah. Sometimes I've wanted to check out a new film on Netflix. I watch the tiny trailer that runs in the app, while I figure out whether it is worth my time.
Trailer ends, and I know all I need to know about the film. The plot is known, the story is more or less obvious. Pick another film, repeat, same thing.
Result: do something else entirely, or watch comfort series like Star Trek, where it doesn't matter that I remember the plotlines.
Huh? The end of the new Alien movie is deeply uncomfortable.
You have to put it up front while the audience is still hyped to see the move. And it's a movie from 45 years ago that was so culturally significant that even if you never saw it you know what happens because you've seen other media reference it. It's a showing specifically for people who've already seen it. Special edition VHS tapes with director commentary put it at the beginning for the same reason. Which yeah, who even has VHS tapes anymore but its the one of the few non-cinema formats constrained by having to make everything serial where you can see the norm.
It’s similiar to the feeling I get with DVD menus. I sometimes feel like watching some classic movie, and so I put on the DVD. But then the DVD menu already shows all the classic scenes and characters, so when I finally have navigated all the menus and started the movie, I no longer want to watch the movie.
DVDs are an insult anyways. No idea who and the idea that enforcing an unskippable piracy warning was a smart idea. Pretending paying customers might be bad actors.
(Of course when using an "illegal" player or pirated copy one could avoid it from the start ... a lot better experience)
When you go to a movie in towns like LA, Seattle or the Bay Area, you can always tell which people work in the industry because they are the only people who stay to watch the credits. Normal humans all leave when the credits start to roll, with a tiny fraction staying in the hope they include a teaser or surprise bit of story in the middle of the credits. Since the producers of the Alien revival had just spent all their money on the interview, they want to make sure people see it, so they put it before the film.
If it's not high enough value on it's own to keep people in their seats, maybe they should skip it. Or at least not put so much effort into it when only the die hards will enjoy it.
I have recently discovered that there is whole wast segment of human population to whom the concept of spoiler is as alien as the actual aliens. Apparently knowing the finale of the book or a movie in advance is not only ok for them, but actually a thing to strive for, like an optimization puzzle. "You, foolish author, thought I would spend 2 hours on this? Haha, I did it in 15 minutes!"
I don't even argue about that nowadays, those people are from different species, not possible to communicate between us :) .
Not about a puzzle. Neither me nor anybody in my family gives a rat tail about spoilers. I am not denying your argument, only several decades ago I hadn't met anybody who cared about any spoiler.
My first exposure to the fact was a Simpsons episode where Homer spoils some movie ending in the theater. But nowadays the antispoilers are everywhere.
Spoilers aren't generally an issue for me. If the content is good enough it doesn't matter knowing what happens at the end. Obviously some things are better unspoiled, maybe like the Usual Suspects, but that rewatched just as interesting as the first time I saw it.
I think you actually have more in common with the people you are lambasting than you think. You seem to all think the specific plot events are the point of the content.
This is why reserved seating is the best thing to happen to movies. I leave for the theatre almost at the time the movie 'starts', get my popcorn/soda, and sit down as the last trailer begins.
This failed me once where for some odd reason the movie actually started on time, but 1-2% failure rate is mostly acceptable.
A friend of mine REALLY wanted to see Transforms, when it was first released. He had it all planned out, we'd met up and get the ticket, 90 minutes before the movie started, go in, and wait, because he didn't want to miss anything. My girlfriend and I was less thrilled with that idea, so we went to get the tickets, got ours and went to dinner. We showed up at our seats 20 minutes after the movie was scheduled to start and didn't miss anything. The rest of the group had waited for almost two hours for a stupid action movie that isn't even all that good.
This is the best part of indie theaters. You show up and when the clock hits about the time shown on the ticket, the lights dim and the film just... starts
Playing ads in general is fine - I like to see trailers for OTHER soon-to-be-released movies ... BUT, don't show trailers for the movie that is actually playing, or maybe simpler (no need to make it movie specific) just don't show trailers for movies that have already been released.
Unfortunately, the lost revenue from marketing would just add cost to tickets. It's likely the theaters get a portion of that revenue if not most of it since it's time spent in their seats.
Where I am, this is deterministic: the "be quiet, the movie is starting" pre roll starts exactly 30 minutes after the claimed start time. I haven't seen an ad at a theater in years.
there was a time when bumperclips were used, a time of film so merging between rolling projectors was an arcane ritual, the jumping hotdog is difficult to unsee
I watched the 1997 Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo + Juliet online with some friends relatively recently, and I'm sort of proud that we managed to not spoil the ending for those who had never read or watched it.
I don’t think I’ll ever see a movie in a theater again. Enough people no longer know how to sit still and shut up that it’s a complete waste of at least $15.
Why would you watch a trailer if you didn’t want to see parts of the movie? I mean even “teasers” can give you significant amounts of info about the movie.
The exact thing happened with the new Deadpool movie. I’d stayed away from spoilers about the movie, especially cameos, and the pre-movie basically gave a full recap of the movie BEFORE the movie.
The re releases are not meant for those watching the movie for the first time. It is assumed the audience coming for these one time events is already a fan of the movie.
Someone behind me before 'Troy' said: "Achillies dies." and someone in front of them turned around and said "Dont ruin the movie." to which the only response I could think of was ... "Were you born in a barn."
Wear dark glasses, and a pair of ear plugs.
"Play that sh* AFTER the movie." Please.
The very best part of Close Encounters is François Truffaut.
Since we're throwing around anecdata, I'll say that I clicked on TFA just because of this comment, and I don't recall having heard of this movie and have no idea what these scenes are about.
I haven't seen the Noah film either but I did read the book on that one! A bit tough to get through but there were some interesting bits. Rated R for violence, sexual themes and controversial politically charged subject material.
Because the movie is 45 years old & in order to get the average person to see an old movie in theaters, you have to give them bonus featurettes in addition to the film itself.
I'd say it's the opposite: people go for the movie, they don't give two damns about the "bonus content" (who does anyway?), so they need to be force-fed with it, just like with ads, if they're to see it. As for why do it in the first place, I'd say that "old movie + exclusive premiere of new extra content" may lead some people to choose the cinema over countless other ways they could watch the same movie at home.
In that case wouldn't it make more sense to put the featurette after the film, so people will stick around through the old movie to see the new hotness?
I went to see The Matrix in a theater recently (25th anniversary release I think) and they did the same thing. 10 minute pre-roll of some random person explaining scene by scene why the movie was so great.
I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing after they've already booked the tickets, went to the theater, overpaid for refreshments, and sat to watch it, but I considered it an absurd waste of time.
Also, even though I saw the movie in the theaters on opening week 25 years ago and probably 20+ other times since, it _still_ felt like a spoiler for me. I can't imagine that ever being fun, or interesting, or useful to anyone. I know what I came to see, and why, please just let me watch it.
That movie in particular I feel like if you didn't see in theaters at the time of release that a big part of the experience is completely lost on you. Literally audiences had never seen anything like it.
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.
I remember going in blind to the film and the first scene with Trinity completely blew everyone in the theater away. One of the greatest openers in action cinema history (if not the greatest)
The Matrix ranks third in my list of 'wow' moments in the cinema.
Joint first is the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and brontosaurus (?) in the true-dinosaur scene of Jurassic Park (not the raptor eggs bit).
SPR's opening was just visceral, especially on a huge cinema screen.
And Jurassic Park's use of the subwoofer meant you really felt that first scene.
FWIW Lost in Space, the year before the Matrix had 'bullet time' in it and no-one seems to remember that.
Same with Transformers (2007). Audience was agog and cheering. But if you weren't there on the day, you'd never understand. The level of CGI dominance would come to be normal these days, but at the time it was unprecedented. I was lucky to see it opening weekend because it was a huge release (blew out Titanic's opening weekend). Nowadays it has the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect but at the time it was unbelievable.
I saw the band Failure live two years ago a few blocks from where I live. The lights went down shortly after we arrived and a video started playing on the projector wall at the back of the stage. It was a series of interview clips with musicians talking about the band we came to see: how transcendentally amazing Failure was, how incredible the sonic textures on "Fantastic Planet" were, how Ken Andrews is an unappreciated genius, etc. I thought that it would be interrupted after maybe 90 seconds by a loud guitar to kick the show off, but nope - we got to hear Hayley Williams and that Zonie vintner guy who sometimes sings for Tool gush about the band that we were waiting to see for _30 minutes straight_.
At one point I checked my receipt to make sure that we didn't accidentally get tickets to some sort of virtual experience or pre-release screening instead of a concert. The video eventually ended, the band came on, and they gave a great performance. I left feeling more confused than anything; the rest of the crowd's reaction ran the gamut from impassioned to dismissive.
If the art you're putting on display already has a cult following I don't see the need to drive the point home via these weird metatextual commentaries. I'm a weirdo that likes watching movies with crew commentary but I like to do that in my living room, not in a theater.
This reminds me of our VHS box set of the Star Wars trilogy, I believe the second release but before the first special edition. Each movie had a several minute interview with George Lucas *before* the movie. I eventually memorized the timestamp of each film but it was such a waste of time in the aggregate to fast forward through. If they had it at the end sure why not, but before??
Very loosely related: This is exactly how I feel about unskippable tutorials in videogames. I feel like it robs me of the fun when a game explains to me what to do and how.
Especially when it's not a persons first play though. Grrrr. :(
A Lord of the Rings Extended Edition replay recently went through the theaters a couple of months ago, so I took my two sons, one of which had seen it already, one for which they were new movies.
To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.
No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.
How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.
It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.
Hoo-boy, had I gone I'd have missed the first 20 minutes of the movie. Since movies now have preassigned seats I generally aim for 15-20 minutes after the time on the ticket.
I took my kids to those as well. For Fellowship we took our time getting popcorn etc, not caring about missing previews… boy was I surprised when we walked in and it had already started.
Made sure to be early for The Two Towers so we did not miss the iconic opening scene. And to the point of the linked blog post… they ran several spoiler-filled ads before the movie started (to be clear: before the starting time, while people were filing into their seats).
> I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing
Because the target public of hollywood movies seems to be idiots. They bring the most money and have relatively low requirements on what constitutes a movie.
One could argue that if a movie is spoiled by someone talking about it, it not that great movie. A great movie is great even if you saw it a dozen times
I don't think that's right. Movies use all sorts of devices to engage their audience. And a lot of them rely on surprise. If they tell you what they're about to do just before you see it happen "for real" - the effect is obviously compromised.
For me the problem with spoilers is not about knowing what is going to happen. A spoiler primes me to be on the lookout for when the spoiled thing happens, and THAT is what most ruins the experience for me.
Of course a great movie can't fully rely on a plot-twist as it's central supporting structure, but it can be a nice spice that can get entirely muted by a spoiler.
I agree 100% with the author. I've seen Alien,but I haven't watched it for a long time. So if I go to see it in the cinema now, while I technically do know what's going to happen - it isn't completely fresh in my mind. So to be shown all the suspenseful, scary bits I'm about to watch, out of context, immediately before the film, is absolutely detrimental to the experience.
That was my experience. For the recent rerelease I took my kids to see it for the first time in the theater. And we were treated to 20 minutes of spoilers before the movie started. Thanks, jerks.
I had a similar experience when I popped in an old DVD of Star Wars (i.e. A New Hope) recently. If I recall correctly, there are some short clips and audio that play as part of the intro before you even get to the main menu, and it includes the famous John Williams theme. I hadn't seen the movie in ages, so I wanted to go in fresh, and this totally ruined the experience.
I had the opposite experience when I popped in another old DVD, this time Amadeus. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie. No DVD menu or previews at all. It just felt so good to go straight to the story.
Yes, a pet peeve of mine is when a DVD plays the movie's opening theme music when the menu is displayed. Why play music that you're going to hear again immediately as soon as the movie starts? Why not play some soothing music that comes midway through the film instead of the opening bombast? For a menu display?
Why not play nothing?
Back in the day when I still used DVDs, I used to strip the soundtrack from the menus and play the resulting backups.
I never felt that the absence of annoyingly-looped background noise and chatter in any way lessened the movie experience.
I 100% believe those menus were made for TV walls at retailers. I tell you, the number of times I saw The Matrix DVD menu playing on a loop at a Wal-Mart.
> I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie.
The new 4k UHD bluray movies seem to do this (or almost). and no region coding nonsense.
I avoid trailers, even for the movies that I'm not going to see imminently.
Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
(Regarding deceitful, you might've seen amateur trailer cuts that, say, make a light comedy look like a dark thriller, but the professionals were doing that first. How would a director have cut this, if they were making a more marketable picture than was actually made?)
Similarly, I avoid seeing any reviews until either after I've watched the movie, or after I've started and am ready to abort it. I want to experience the storytelling, and also form my own impression, before someone spoils either for me.
I do often vet a title first by looking at its ratings pair on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ (RT), and occasionally I look at the one-sentence review summary blurb. Especially for streaming services in recent years, where the majority of the titles are either mediocre or poor.
(SPOILER ALERT: Though, vetting with RT won't always save you from a bad experience. The other night's evening wind-down light movie, I picked what looked like a generic Jason Statham film, IIRC without vetting. And around halfway in, I was horrified, when the formulaic gruff antihero's redemption-lite arc suddenly reversed, to a double-down of violent and unnecessary pure evil, upon some innocent child. Then I went to skim the RT's summaries of professional reviews, and even none of those summaries warned of this.)
I liked the way Netflix used to automatically start playing whatever show/movie you're hovering over in the app from the first scene. If the first 30-60 seconds pulled you in, you'd continue on to watch the full movie/show without actually clicking "Play" (which also fixed the mental burden of deciding what to watch, since "stop scrolling through options" resulted in automatically playing whatever you landed on).
They've since replaced that with auto-playing trailers which seems to be standard these days. I really like when they just auto-played the movie/show -- most movies/shows already set up the plot decently enough in the first 60-90 seconds (well enough to know whether you want to watch it) and of course that also resolves the "spoiler in trailer" issue.
> I liked the way Netflix used to automatically start playing whatever show/movie you're hovering over in the app from the first scene.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription over that feature... If I want to watch it, I'll press play.
> Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
This feels like a strange take to me. Trailers are just advertisements for movies, and ads have to both inform about a product and hype it up. Do you also feel spoiled when you see an ad for a new burger because you’ve lost the mystery of what the toppings are? Do you feel deceived because the burger isn’t actually 3 feet wide like it was on the billboard?
Burgers aren't supposed to have plot developments and surprises like stories. That comparison makes no sense to me.
I would feel deceived if the ad showed off a beef burger and I got chicken. Or if I got some kind of meal that's the correct size but has a burger portion only 4cm wide. Now, sometimes trailers avoid big chunks of genre in service of not spoiling things, and that's a gambit that can work out, but most movies are a consistent genre and if they're trying to hype up a tiny portion of the movie because the rest is boring then that's not good.
> Do you also feel spoiled when you see an ad for a new burger because you’ve lost the mystery of what the toppings are?
Seeing the ad for the burger doesn't spoil much of the value that is the point of the burger.
Analogous spoiling would be to make the actual burger taste not as good, or to make the actual burger be less nutritious.
Have you ever watch films because of plot, not just for entertainment?
Time Trap (2017) is an excellent low budget sci-fi movie with a trailer that spoils the key plot elements. Had I watched the trailer before the movie, I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed Time Trap nearly as much.
It happened to me when I was reading a new edition of ”The Spoils of Poynton” by Henry James.
There was an essay in the beginning of the book that I started reading on inertia alone (yes, I know, I should have known better). In the first paragraph (maybe first sentence), it spoiled the dramatic ending.
Not only that, in the second paragraph it would give an interpretation of what that means. So I was robbed not only of the plot, but also of a interpretation of my own before reading it. I quit the book after those two paragraphs and never read it.
I am still mad at the introduction for “The Idiot” for spoiling as much as possible and analyzing every plot point or emotional moment and then bringing up the author’s life on top of that. I could only imagine anyone who willfully puts these before a work wishes that no one should feel joy from reading. I still overall liked the book, but it could have been so different. I’ve also decided to wait a while to digest books before looking deeper into others’ opinions, including the author’s.
This is super common in introductions for anything that might be called a classic.
If you prefer to go into a work cold and only consult outside help if e.g. something necessary about the setting is unfamiliar in a way that wasn’t intended, as I do, you have to skip those until you’re done.
Movies are even worse. It can be really hard to go in cold to any remotely-popular film, they splash so much advertising and promotion everywhere that gives things away, even if not exactly spoilers.
Well, the book is called "Spoils" and it delivered on its promise.
Yep, I realized that while writing my comment lol
I’m sure the irony of the blog post spoiling several classic movie scenes is not lost on the blogger.
I personally had zero expectations that a blog post around the subject of spoilers wouldn't talk about spoilers. So, not ironic for me.
Just like I expect that visiting a web page about how frustrating malware is would infect my computer with malware.
It's very vague about the other movies, I disagree.
Even for the subject of the post the only spoiler is the single word "chestburster".
The issue is statistics. There are billions of blog posts and only a tiny fraction of them talk about content of story based media, and most of the ones which do so are prefacing spoilers or hiding them. Same on forums. On the other hand 99% of all cinemas show spoilers of various severity before 99% of all movies. I've stopped watching movie trailers on streaming services a decade ago and the issue was severe even back then. Cinemas show the same or even longer trailers with spoilers for practically every movie in current season. It is rather offensive for me - to pay money to watch movie and get worse experience than pirates have.
I was careful to word it in such a way that I would NOT spoil the movies I discuss.
"chestburster scene" isn't a particularly hard one to figure out
The article isn't saying "don't talk about these old movies at all as it spoils them"; it is, instead, very explicit that this is about "the movie we are seated to see".
How many kids are reading it though?
And further, would a kid want to be surprised by the spoilers contained in the entry?
My favorite was for some of the marvel movies they ran marvel lego commercials that spoiled the entire plot right before the movie.
Wait those movies have plots?
In care you are really un-aware... Yes. They have plots, and they're very well made.
A sequence of connected events happening is practically the only major element of telling a story that they consistently have in good measure, so… yes?
Theme, characters that aren’t “cool quippy person” or “somewhat alien quippy person”, a message they not just set up but then commit to, use of action for anything other than spectacle, et c. Lots of story-things (to say nothing of film craft—score, scene-setting and shot choices) of other sorts they are weak on. Plot, they have.
[edit] and yeah, I’ve seen all of them except a few of the recent ones at least twice regardless. It’s fine to like things that are not, you know, great.
I watch for the plot, similar to another popular ignominious genre
This happened recently for the screening of The Matrix for its 25th anniversary.
My partner had never seen it, and sure enough they spent almost ten minutes spoiling it with a pointless featurette featuring some unknown new star reminiscing about the movie.
My partner closed her eyes and I held her ears.
Same thing happened to me. I had seen The Matrix countless times, but this was going to be my first rewatch in a few years and my first rewatch ever in theaters. Part of the reason I was going was to get that awesome feeling you get when seeing a perfectly-crafted scene "for the first time" on the big screen. That featurette was so silly. They just went scene by scene showing 5 seconds each of iconic scenes from the movie. Right before the actual movie was about to start. Ugh.
Who expects to avoid spoilers for a 25 year old blockbuster?
That would be like trying to avoid a spoiler for who won the Civil War in a U.S History class.
My younger kids hadn’t seen the Matrix and I thought the 25th anniversary release in the theater would be perfect.
Leading up to it I tried to create the mystery for them that I remembered 25 years ago.
All of the mystery was destroyed with the featurette.
I was so annoyed and disappointed. But they enjoyed the movie so that was good at least.
That is so frustrating.
It’s got to be some phenomenon where people can’t understand obvious things. Fully expect some Reddit post with “It’s hinted that Anakin is Luke’s father”.
I think the publishers etc. have identified that audiences actually don’t get stuff unless browbeaten with it.
Hence movie featurettes with spoilers and book introductions that describe the plot.
They’re trying to hit a full 80% of the population and that means you have to go one standard deviation below mean IQ.
The subreddit /r/yourjokebutworse is a showcase of this phenomenon.
incredibly non-controversial take:
The majority of Re-release audiences have seen the movie before and don't want to sit through the credits for extras.
I get that this sucks for first timers, but they are not the target market.
> don't want to sit through the credits for extras.
Then have an intermission whilst the credits roll. Serve ice cream and refreshments. Make it part of the experience. It'll be fun.
Or sell tickets separaly for the pre-feature and the main feature (or just publish times when each will start and have an intermission in between so if you want to just see the main feature you can without disrupting anyone who arrived early for the pre-featured).
You have no idea who has seen these films and who hasn't. Yes, sometimes I want to go and see an old film at the cinema because I never got a chance to see it there the first time around (Star Wars was a case in point back in 1997). But sometimes I just haven't seen it so I want to see it for the first time, unmolested by spoilers.
There are better and more creative ways that aren't a great deal of effort to implement to handle this than showing a bunch of spoilers before the film you're there to see.
I like the idea of publishing the actual start times. People who dont want to watch the pre-feature can step out for an ice-cream.
Won't happen. Pre-features, like pre-movie ads, are not there for the benefit of the viewer.
I dont understand. for who's benefit is an interview with director about the film you are about to watch screened.
I think the interview is filmed primarily for the ability to say it exists on marketing copy, thus hopefully sell more tickets. It offer something "new" that differentiates the cinema screening of an old movie from any of the alternative (legal or otherwise) ways of viewing it.
The interview itself? Probably doesn't matter. But for the people involved, it would suck to see no one viewing it.
I'd expect there would be plenty of people who would choose to view it. For "Alien" I'd expect a big chunk of the audience would be people who have only seen it on home media but became huge fans and have watched it many times. They would know every scene, so nothing in the pre-movie extras would be a spoiler for them.
That doesn't make sense. If that interview sold a single ticket more then you already have people who obviously wanted to see it
Not necessarily. People often make purchase decisions based on overall feeling, versus specific, discrete benefits - they'll choose a "fuller experience" because it feels more complete, and then end up not bothering to go beyond the "basic package".
And if nobody goes to see the interview, that’s an important signal to not waste time on doing them.
I went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show and everyone kept getting up and singing!!!
Asshole! Slut!
At my theater some people used to get nude too. RIP Rialto Theatre - to add insult to injury it’s a church now. Dr. Frank-N-Furter is rolling in his grave.
So, the first time I went to see it I was there by chance, because it was in an amusement park and I really didn't know the first thing about what I was getting into.
And yes, at the time I thought the people were being rude, especially when they where howling at the usherette.
Then I saw other performances online and felt like a complete tool :)
[dead]
At the 25 year mark? A sizable part of the movie-going audience wasn't even born then.
(Looked for statistics on movie-goer demographics. Found this on Statistica: "In 2019, there were 5.5 million frequent moviegoers aged 60 or above, up from 6.6 million in the previous year."[1] They need to upgrade their LLM.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251466/us-movie-theater-...
Ive also seen trailers for the movie I am about to see, that revealed things I didn’t know already.
so you agree it should be showed after?
so many people say this as if it is a sufficient rebuke of the whole point. OP agrees with you - the point is show it after.
I only pick on you because many people responded but at one time HN had people with critical reasoning skills reading
Whenever I've seen theaters do this type of thing, they do it before the published show time. Related content first, then at the published show time trailers start, then a bit later the actual movie starts.
If you don't want spoilers, then you just don't go in until the published show time.
> and don't want to sit through the credits for extras
Everything's digital now, right? We have the technology to insert a featurette between the end of the movie and the credits without anyone having to go splice the film reels.
I absolutely disagree. As three article mentioned, a big draw of these screenings is for a person who watched and loved a film to take a friend or family member who hasn't yet.
Yes, the author has a good point in a vacuum, but used a bad example to highlight that point in practice. Even for the minority of the audience who hasn't seen the movie yet, they almost certainly know what happens due to cultural osmosis. Children are probably the only group who could potentially be spoiled and let's just say I don't think the rerelease of 40+ year old R rated movie is necessarily targeted at children.
Maybe an apochryphal story, but a famous orchestra conductor was talking to the players before a Mozart review show and had this to say:
"Look, I know that professionals like you have been playing this music since you were kids and don't find it very inspiring anymore. And I'll be honest, we do this material to sell tickets and make money for our other more challenging repertoire.
But if you're having trouble finding your passion for this show, please remember that it's a full house, so you can be sure that for some of those people, this will be the first time they hear this music.
And for others in the audience, it will be their last."
Trailers give away the entire film these days. No surprises allowed
I've seen some movies not knowing anything about them by avoiding trailer (this being much easier in the 1990s...) Movies seems to work better that way.
Though it can be jarring: Eg. Silence of the Lambs or Leaving Las Vegas.
The Onion had a good take on it:
https://theonion.com/wildly-popular-iron-man-trailer-to-be-a...
I heard once that this is because the creators of the trailers are separate entities from the movie studio. Their job is to sell the movie. They don't care if they have to spoil the whole movie to get you to buy a ticket to see it.
I think some movies are so crap that they've only got 2 min of good material, so that's what they put in the trailer.
And then you have trailers like Cloud Atlas which are 5 minutes long and don't spoil a single thing about the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s
I can usually tell within the first third of a trailer whether I'd like to watch it. In those cases I don't finish the trailer. They give everything away.
It’s been like that for my whole adult life (20 years). When I used to go to theaters, I would wait outside until the trailers stopped.
Knowing nothing about what I’m about to watch is my favorite way.
One thing I always wished was possible is to see The Worlds End without any pre-knowledge. The trailer completely gave away the premise.
The worst are the trailers for really bad movies. I recall one where the trailer was literally the only good scenes in the movie.
Yeah. Sometimes I've wanted to check out a new film on Netflix. I watch the tiny trailer that runs in the app, while I figure out whether it is worth my time.
Trailer ends, and I know all I need to know about the film. The plot is known, the story is more or less obvious. Pick another film, repeat, same thing.
Result: do something else entirely, or watch comfort series like Star Trek, where it doesn't matter that I remember the plotlines.
I'll go one worse: The trailer for City of Ember spoiled the big reveal that was at the end of the book.
The reason in general is we don't have uncomfortable enjoyable experiences now, we have predictable things happen to us passively.
Huh? The end of the new Alien movie is deeply uncomfortable.
You have to put it up front while the audience is still hyped to see the move. And it's a movie from 45 years ago that was so culturally significant that even if you never saw it you know what happens because you've seen other media reference it. It's a showing specifically for people who've already seen it. Special edition VHS tapes with director commentary put it at the beginning for the same reason. Which yeah, who even has VHS tapes anymore but its the one of the few non-cinema formats constrained by having to make everything serial where you can see the norm.
It’s similiar to the feeling I get with DVD menus. I sometimes feel like watching some classic movie, and so I put on the DVD. But then the DVD menu already shows all the classic scenes and characters, so when I finally have navigated all the menus and started the movie, I no longer want to watch the movie.
DVDs are an insult anyways. No idea who and the idea that enforcing an unskippable piracy warning was a smart idea. Pretending paying customers might be bad actors.
(Of course when using an "illegal" player or pirated copy one could avoid it from the start ... a lot better experience)
When you go to a movie in towns like LA, Seattle or the Bay Area, you can always tell which people work in the industry because they are the only people who stay to watch the credits. Normal humans all leave when the credits start to roll, with a tiny fraction staying in the hope they include a teaser or surprise bit of story in the middle of the credits. Since the producers of the Alien revival had just spent all their money on the interview, they want to make sure people see it, so they put it before the film.
If it's not high enough value on it's own to keep people in their seats, maybe they should skip it. Or at least not put so much effort into it when only the die hards will enjoy it.
I have recently discovered that there is whole wast segment of human population to whom the concept of spoiler is as alien as the actual aliens. Apparently knowing the finale of the book or a movie in advance is not only ok for them, but actually a thing to strive for, like an optimization puzzle. "You, foolish author, thought I would spend 2 hours on this? Haha, I did it in 15 minutes!"
I don't even argue about that nowadays, those people are from different species, not possible to communicate between us :) .
Not about a puzzle. Neither me nor anybody in my family gives a rat tail about spoilers. I am not denying your argument, only several decades ago I hadn't met anybody who cared about any spoiler.
My first exposure to the fact was a Simpsons episode where Homer spoils some movie ending in the theater. But nowadays the antispoilers are everywhere.
Coming out of the closet or a fancy?
Spoilers aren't generally an issue for me. If the content is good enough it doesn't matter knowing what happens at the end. Obviously some things are better unspoiled, maybe like the Usual Suspects, but that rewatched just as interesting as the first time I saw it.
I think you actually have more in common with the people you are lambasting than you think. You seem to all think the specific plot events are the point of the content.
I was at an animated film earlier this year where they put the recorded q&a on before the film.
Had the effect of making one pair of noisy kids totally lose their attention and proceed to run around the theater for the rest of the film.
Is anyone actually paying to see some recorded q&a? The live ones are usually turgid enough but at least the people are right there
Note, this blog post has spoilers for:
* Alien (1979)
* Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Exhibit A: Terminator 2 trailer [1]
Insane how they spoiled the main twist.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE
This is why reserved seating is the best thing to happen to movies. I leave for the theatre almost at the time the movie 'starts', get my popcorn/soda, and sit down as the last trailer begins.
This failed me once where for some odd reason the movie actually started on time, but 1-2% failure rate is mostly acceptable.
A friend of mine REALLY wanted to see Transforms, when it was first released. He had it all planned out, we'd met up and get the ticket, 90 minutes before the movie started, go in, and wait, because he didn't want to miss anything. My girlfriend and I was less thrilled with that idea, so we went to get the tickets, got ours and went to dinner. We showed up at our seats 20 minutes after the movie was scheduled to start and didn't miss anything. The rest of the group had waited for almost two hours for a stupid action movie that isn't even all that good.
I have an idea to fix this.
- Start the movie on time - Don't play trailers before the movie - Don't play ads EVER for people paying for their ticket
This is the best part of indie theaters. You show up and when the clock hits about the time shown on the ticket, the lights dim and the film just... starts
Playing ads in general is fine - I like to see trailers for OTHER soon-to-be-released movies ... BUT, don't show trailers for the movie that is actually playing, or maybe simpler (no need to make it movie specific) just don't show trailers for movies that have already been released.
Unfortunately, the lost revenue from marketing would just add cost to tickets. It's likely the theaters get a portion of that revenue if not most of it since it's time spent in their seats.
Even all that won't fix:
- assholes looking at their smartphone during the movie
- assholes who won't shut the fuck up
Gave up the whole movie theater experience. My fancy reclining sofa and huge 4K OLED TV are way better already.
Where I am, this is deterministic: the "be quiet, the movie is starting" pre roll starts exactly 30 minutes after the claimed start time. I haven't seen an ad at a theater in years.
there was a time when bumperclips were used, a time of film so merging between rolling projectors was an arcane ritual, the jumping hotdog is difficult to unsee
https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=theater+intermissions [VIDEO]
I watched season 1 of Yellowstone (with kevin costner), and it was pretty interesting.
I don't usually watch the extras, but for some reason I let it run and watched the behind the scenes interview.
and they summed up the premise behind the entire series in a one line burn-all-the-bridges SPOILER.
ugh.
I haven't bothered watching season 2...
I watched the 1997 Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo + Juliet online with some friends relatively recently, and I'm sort of proud that we managed to not spoil the ending for those who had never read or watched it.
I don’t think I’ll ever see a movie in a theater again. Enough people no longer know how to sit still and shut up that it’s a complete waste of at least $15.
you need to go to nicer communities to watch films without disruption. That specialized screenings that target film buffs.
Why would you watch a trailer if you didn’t want to see parts of the movie? I mean even “teasers” can give you significant amounts of info about the movie.
The exact thing happened with the new Deadpool movie. I’d stayed away from spoilers about the movie, especially cameos, and the pre-movie basically gave a full recap of the movie BEFORE the movie.
My wife and I were livid.
I avoid trailers for films I intend to see and the enjoyment is much greater
> We took our kid to see "Alien"
As a parent, I simply loved that opening line.
The re releases are not meant for those watching the movie for the first time. It is assumed the audience coming for these one time events is already a fan of the movie.
Fans of a movie will often bring people who haven’t seen the movie. So sure 80+% of the audience may have seen it, but that’s not everyone.
Star Wars: Episode V - I am your Father
Someone behind me before 'Troy' said: "Achillies dies." and someone in front of them turned around and said "Dont ruin the movie." to which the only response I could think of was ... "Were you born in a barn."
Wear dark glasses, and a pair of ear plugs.
"Play that sh* AFTER the movie." Please.
The very best part of Close Encounters is François Truffaut.
I feel like complaining about spoilers for a 45 year old movie is a bit silly.
By the way, did you know Jesus dies at the end of the Bible.
I haven’t even seen the movie but I know about that iconic scene. This is a bit like complaining about spoiling the flood scene in the Noah film.
Since we're throwing around anecdata, I'll say that I clicked on TFA just because of this comment, and I don't recall having heard of this movie and have no idea what these scenes are about.
I haven't seen the Noah film either but I did read the book on that one! A bit tough to get through but there were some interesting bits. Rated R for violence, sexual themes and controversial politically charged subject material.
Why do this before the movie!??!
Because the movie is 45 years old & in order to get the average person to see an old movie in theaters, you have to give them bonus featurettes in addition to the film itself.
I'd say it's the opposite: people go for the movie, they don't give two damns about the "bonus content" (who does anyway?), so they need to be force-fed with it, just like with ads, if they're to see it. As for why do it in the first place, I'd say that "old movie + exclusive premiere of new extra content" may lead some people to choose the cinema over countless other ways they could watch the same movie at home.
In that case wouldn't it make more sense to put the featurette after the film, so people will stick around through the old movie to see the new hotness?
"The solution is simple: preserve the wonder for first-timers by putting these featurettes AFTER the movie. Tease it before the feature."