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.
>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
I don't (i only know there's an alien chest bursting scene). If I went to cinema and someone spoiled the movie for me, I'd just get up and leave because I hate spoilers.
Though I don't watch a lot of movies and don't go to cinemas, so obviously my opinion doesn't matter.
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.
Specifically, Alamo Drafthouse's entire sales pitch is that, watching movies with other film buffs. No cellphones allowed. you want to do that, go to AMC.
This didn’t used to be a problem and I don’t want to risk $15-$20 and my inner peace trying out new theaters.
I saw Megalopolis with 6 other people in the theater and all of them were talking the whole time. I’m just flabbergasted why they would waste their own time with such an odd movie.
It didn't used to be a problem for me, but cell phones didn't exist when I grew up. People suck, but it differs from location to location. I drive to places with more affluent and educated demographics to watch movies.
>I’m just flabbergasted why they would waste their own time with such an odd movie.
Lots of people don't and many theatres are struggling. If I understand your example, your theatre was 99% empty and you were the only non-talker there, haha.
There's a chunk of people who will pay to see a movie at a big multiscreen theater, then go from one movie to another and see a whole days worth of movies for the price of one.
As you said, a "weird" movie doesn't keep their attention, so they just distracted themselves with their phones to kill the time until the next movie.
As an aside, the funniest instance of this phenomenon I ever encountered was when I was at an evening screening of an incredibly embarrassing idol anime movie at an AMC and two extremely out of place people walked in partway through, lasted about 5 minutes and then had to bail when one of the singing numbers started lol.
Hey you actually got me to investigate and it turns out my city has two indie theaters with good reputations. I will try them out before I give up completely.
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.
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 :)
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.
It's pretty easy to make almost everybody happy, because almost nobody wants to see the extras anyway, and certainly not before the movie.
You, who have watched the movie before, want to watch it again and relive the thrills (even if you know the plot), not watch a 10 minute featurette about the movie. If you can still be bothered, you'll stay after the credits. If you cannot be bothered, the featurette wasn't that interesting anyway.
Think about it this way: would you have the excited conversation of "wasn't it cool when so-and-so chopped whathisname's head with the sword!?!?" before or after actually watching the scene as intended?
>Think about it this way: would you have the excited conversation of "wasn't it cool when so-and-so chopped whathisname's head with the sword!?!?" before or after actually watching the scene as intended?
It really depends on if I have seen the movie, and how recently. If it is going to contextualize the scene for me, then before, so I can think about what they said.
Back when DVD was king, I liked directors commentary where they talked throughout the entire move.
Did you usually watch DVDs with running commentary alone or with other watchers? And when you got the DVD, did you watch the movie first as intended and later with commentary, or did you jump to the commentary straight away?
I agree, or else you're going to see the film again in person for the experience of being in a theater with a whole bunch of other people and seeing it on a very big screen. I don't think the draw for me to see a film again in the theater is the fact that there will be an intro discussion on it. That just seems like pure marketing to give a value-add to the experience, but I doubt most people going are there for that.
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.
I mean, I've got a kid and love when I can take him to see a rerelease of a culturally significant movie when the content is appropriate. Spoilers in the pre-rolls are definitely an issue. Even if it's just me going, some of the movies I go to see are movies where I've seen bits and pieces here and there and cultural osmosis, but it can be a bit of a bummer to have the 5 minute rehash of the film before seeing the whole thing.
OTOH, video disc menus sometimes do this too. You've got to put some content in the menus, I suppose, but it can easily be too much. I've got a few discs that just dump you straight into the movie, which is often a better choice.
>I mean, I've got a kid and love when I can take him to see a rerelease of a culturally significant movie when the content is appropriate. Spoilers in the pre-rolls are definitely an issue.
Yes, to be clear I'm not criticizing this. I am pointing out the actual percentage of the audience who would be impacted by this is tiny. Inconveniencing everyone else in the audience by forcing them to sit through the credits if they want to see the bonus content just to give this small group a slightly better experience probably isn't something the theater actually wants to do.
Right. My 13 year-old's seen Jurassic Park on TV enough times but I still took him to the theatrical re-release because I figured he'd want to see it on a gigantic screen with dinosaurs towering overhead, and I was right.
I was making an argument for before. If 90% of customers want it before so they dont have to sit through credits, it is very understandable that it is shown before.
That said, I have no clue what the actual percentage is. Maybe someone has A/B tested this
> but at one time HN had people with critical reasoning skills reading
As long as HN keeps people with reading skills at all...
The GP directly argued against the blog post, and in favor of showing the extras before the movie, because "majority of Re-release audiences have seen the movie before and don't want to sit through the credits for extras".
(I happen to disagree with the argument on the basis of "who on Earth cares about extras anyway", but still, GP correctly made a coherent point.)
> 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".
> 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.
Showing my age here. A family member of mine used to run a local theater. The booth had multiple projectors, because films came on multiple reels (and once you knew what to look for, you could not unsee the reel switch indicators). So we've had the technology for a long time to pause a feature before the credits and roll another featureette and then switch back.
That’s actually a big no-no in cinema. You don’t just splice a movie you’re showing to insert stuff, much like museums don’t usually draw on their paintings. Showing the work as the creator intended is the whole point.
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.
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.)
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 avoid trailers like the plague. When reading reviews I'll skip most of it. I want to know the gist of the plot, and I want to know the summary.
I enjoy movies so much more this way. Sure, sometimes I end up watching some duds, but most of the time I'm really engrossed and I love the surprises.
If I watch a trailer, especially the modern 5-minute condensed versions, I find it takes away >90% of the excitement. Doesn't matter if the movie comes out next year, the trailer will come back to me and I will recall the spoiled plot points.
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.
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.
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.
The earlier movies like Iron Man were kind of okay plot-wise. Definitely sometimes I didn't fully connect with the character's motivations but it was fine. They've really gone downhill now I feel. Whatever little plot there is feels like it's treated as an afterthought. Things just kind of... happen. It makes the characters lose identity, I think.
I honestly feel like the plot is fighting. They're movies about fighting after all. There are two types of movies - movies about fighting and other movies.
I'm going to exaggerate a bit but not much. I have "that friend", I'm sure we all do, who insists there's a reason to watch whichever 5 movie before this one. But it's a movie about fighting. Those 2 minutes of development matters so little to anything that makes the movie what it is. And it was designed for people to be able to follow without having watched anything before it.
So sure they have plot. But it's completely inconsequential. Because fighting.
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.
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.
Poor analogy imo. It's socially acceptable to talk about movies that were aired years ago with or without a warning. It's never socially acceptable to infect someones computer with malware prior to explicit consent. There's an expectation that someone writing about spoilers, will in fact detail the spoiler in question. Given that's an expectation you consent to being told about the spoiler by reading the article. If that isn't an expectation, I'm curious what you or anyone else had hoped the article would be talking about?
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".
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.
How likely is it really that you'd go to a theater to watch a movie if they didn't have previews? If you want to see a movie in theaters, that's where you're going to be. If you're taking that view, you're probably not in their target (ahem) audience.
I suspect that people are more sensitive to ticket prices than they are seeing ads, so if you're trying to maximize revenue, you'd want to limit increases in ticket prices to keep getting viewers in the seats. Then once they are there, try to extract as much additional revenue as possible (concessions, ads, etc). The theaters showing ads aren't trying to attract new viewers, they are trying to extract as much revenue as possible from their existing customers.
I'd say your explanation is accurate, that's the calculus. It's the same everywhere.
Unfortunately, the calculus never factors in the fact that it's unsustainable and over time destroys the medium, by changing peoples' and society's relationship with it.
C.f. all the stories about "good old times" that are just remembrance of things before they got enshittificated.
Only if you have the money to spend. $30.00 to see a movie every so often is a lot easier to afford for someone living paycheck to paycheck. A person could probably see movies for several years without reaching the price of a good home theater system.
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
My local indie cinema has locally produced indie ads for local businesses. It’s cute and part of the charm! They also play trailers, but just 1 or 2, not a whole bunch like big chain cinemas.
I think the point is that instead of asking cinemas to self regulate one could simply watch to movie at home.
I see it as part of a general trend where public spaces are tarnished by a general public that is unable to behave itself.
I think in time the process will accelerate and more and more public spaces will be replaced by private spaces. This is fine for people like myself who can afford such private spaces but I think it’s bad for society which I still have to live in.
> I see it as part of a general trend where public spaces are tarnished by a general public that is unable to behave itself.
It's easy to blame the people, when it comes to the folks who can't stop pulling out their cell phones many of them have been conditioned to act that way from a very young age. If we keep letting companies turn people into anxious iphone addicts it'll only get worse. They can't stay off their phones while driving, asking them to go for an hour and half without looking at their phone violates everything their phone has taught them about how to behave
We need to stop excusing bad behavior (by people with agency and control over their bodies) with "well, corporations made them do it!" Cell phone companies are not turning people into inconsiderate jerks--they already are inconsiderate jerks, and their phone just provides them another way to be jerky to everyone.
I've seen good people do it, and be embarrassed by it after I told them to put it away.
It just doesn't make much sense that we've allowed behavioral conditioning to be carried out on the population multiple times a day, every single day, since before they could even read, if we're then going to be mad when some percentage of those people go on to act in exactly the way they've been trained to.
Not everyone has been conditioned to that extent, or will be as susceptible, or at least not as susceptible to it all the time, but this should be the expected outcome. It'd actually be very weird and unexpected if no one ever pulled out their phones in theaters.
If you're suggesting that accidently additive products and services be banned from use for the public good then I'm in 100% agreement. What I'm not sure of is how that could possibly be reliably achieved. I guess 'sin' taxes would a blend of freedom and prohibition but then you get a government that depends on the sin for it's revenue which sets up a rather perverse incentive. Like an alcohol tax in Russia, or indulgences for the Catholic church.
TikTok is slowly destroying my sisters life and there is nothing anyone can do about it since she does not think it's a problem and she is an adult.
Zynga and King do not hire psychologists because their products are "accidentally" addictive.
None of this shit is "accidentally" addictive. They explicitly track "engagement" and screen time as metrics to increase.
Addictivity is not an accident! This isn't like with drugs where we just pulled a chemical that already existed out of nature and it just happens to press the same pleasure center buttons as chemicals in our brain.
These companies make their products addicting and addictive on purpose. It is the intended goal of most businesses today.
The accidentally addictive was purely to make it clear that intent is not required to be shown for a ban, only outcome. Accidentally or accidentally on purpose it does not matter.
Unfortunately, society in general, not just cinemas, has decided not to hold assholes accountable to their assholic behavior, so behavior is only going to get worse. It's something voters (and consumers by voting with wallet) have the collective power to change, but we refuse to.
There is a general loss of civility, in my view nothing can be done about it and those who try will be simply throwing themselves against the gears of the machine to no avail.
If I was responsible for maintaining behavior in a public space, say as a restaurateur, the law would not be on my side. If I tell a minority woman that she needs to behave is that a hate crime or criminal misogyny? I'm sure my life would be destroyed while we found out. The state has in effect taken over the role of policing behavior and has done an incredibly bad job of it.
This isn't a figment of my imagination - I was pulled into a tribunal because I expressed amusement at something my female colleague said, I thought it was funny and I thought we were friends, she made a misogyny complaint to hr. Trying to explain why I thought it was funny didn't help nor did the explanation that I would have acted the same if a man had said what she did. I've since avoided working at large companies which has been an impingement on my career but at least I don't have to be stressed each day about some possible perceived microaggression.
Perhaps an intentional community which can use ostracism as a punishment to police behavior could be effective.
It wasn't a joke, she asked for help in the form of how do I do X without using Y. I just went 'ha - yeah everyone has trouble with Y when they first see it. It's a bit tricky, let me show you how it's done using Y and then how it's done without using Y'. I correctly assumed she was avoiding the use of Y due to her unfamiliarity with it. She was a band new intern and I had many years of experience. She had been regularly coming to me for help which I had been doing after hours on my own time. She did not understand the seriousness of the hr thing and expected me to continue mentoring her like nothing had happened.
Oh, I think there are a lot of us voting with their wallets already and that's one of the reasons the assholic behavior is getting worse: those that care have given up and don't show up anymore.
I go during the day on the rare occasions that we go.
My kid randomly decided that he wanted to see Deadpool & Wolverine while we were out doing errands, so we went to the theater on what turned out to be the opening day.
No way were there even 10 more people in the theater at 1PM on a Friday.
At least around here, the cinemas are never crowded during the daytime.
> - assholes looking at their smartphone during the movie
Solved by arranging seats so that the backs of the seat in front of you blocks off from seeing anything below the next rows' head level, and so your head is looking at the screen in resting position anyway.
> - assholes who won't shut the fuck up
Solved by turning up the volume.
Big cinemas with large viewing halls have a big advantage over studio cinemas here.
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
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.
I like previews and trailers before the movie... sometimes it's informative (new movie that I didn't know about). But really, for me, they act as a palate cleanser of sorts. It sets the stage that I'm about to watch a movie. It serves to separate the "before movie" time from the "movie time". They let my mind shutdown the outside world.
But showing documentary footage that spoils the movie I'm about to watch? Yeah... don't do that.
If you consider the trailer for the movie you are just about to watch a spoiler, then I would expect that trailers for other movies that you might watch at some other time would be considered spoilers as well, no?
What's the difference? (Other than the probability of actually at some time watching the movie being spoiled.)
I don't tend to remember details of trailers - just that it looked good (or not), and then the name of the movie may stick in my head (or I may mark release date on my calendar). By the time the movie comes out months later, I'm not going to have remembered much about the trailer.
I don't know, if the film starts at 9, start it at 9, don't start it at 9:15. I don't want to see the trailers, I'm just there for the film. Start the trailers at 8:45 if you want, but have the actual film start at the time it says, so I know how to skip the trailers I don't want to see.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't see why it would. As the author said, featurettes are traditionally shown before the movie & this was clearly advertised. This gives movie goers a chance to ask about it if it is that important to them. That seems like there's enough inertia for people to expect it to be before. Theaters also want people to show up early before a movie's start time so there's a higher chance they get hungry or thirsty while they're there and they also want people out of the theater asap after the movie so they can turn the theater over for the next showing or go home. If they get to start early because people are leaving during the credits, even better.
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.
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 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)
Likewise. I was deep in grad school at the time, and didn't pay much attention to the rest of the world. My knowledge of The Matrix was that I'd seen some posters, some friends asked if I wanted to go with them, and I did. We didn't even talk about the movie on the way there, it was just "the move that weekend". Absolutely blown away is right. From the opening all the way through to the ending and credit roll.
It was 1999, not easy at all to get deeper information about just released movies apart from some 2-3 paragraphs from critics' on newspapers.
I also went blind to watch it after school with some friends, it was a mind blowing experience compared to the 90s action movies, everything else in the genre before that just felt bland and unpolished. I went 3 times on the same month with different people to re-watch it.
Thirded - the early bullet time sequence with Trinity was mind blowing at the time.
More recently, when I've had the chance to rewatch the movie I've shifted my awe to the helicopter crash scene [1], which contains so many elements that were unprecedented at the time in an incredibly neat way. It's one of those things where they could have just settled for one of the effects and still do something incredible for the time, but they went ahead and pushed the envelope so much further.
The movie is pretty much that - just the plot would have been sufficient for an incredible film but they had so much creativity to spare that they also reinvented the genre's cinematography because why the hell not?
That link, and the releases after the original 35mm release and the DVD, all feature a colour-correction that wasn't there when the movie was first released. The movie had a slight green edge on its original release, but it wasn't THAT green. It's a shame they toyed with it.
I first saw the scene on a tiny airplane seat headrest screen and remember being jolted awake by how mind-blowing it was. I watched the movie twice on that trans-Atlantic flight.
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 also found the CGI to be too busy to follow anything going on and it didn't improve with subsequent movies. I called it "motion soup" at the time and haven't come up with a better term for it.
Feels slightly different in that the Matrix is original so literally nobody in the GPs audience knew what to expect whereas Transformers has been a thing (comics, toys, hundreds of TV episodes) since the mid 1980s. I also feel like the early 2000s had a lot of good CGI movies (LOTR, King Kong, etc) so that to me doesn't explain it either
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadYou 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.
The OP was talking about seeing it IN the theater. They are presumably hyped.
Alien is a wonderful movie, but that isn't my point at all.
I don't (i only know there's an alien chest bursting scene). If I went to cinema and someone spoiled the movie for me, I'd just get up and leave because I hate spoilers.
Though I don't watch a lot of movies and don't go to cinemas, so obviously my opinion doesn't matter.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/sony-pic...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40662181
one of the few times I walked out of a theater was an alamo drafthouse with some guy loudly eating wings and wiping his hands on the seats
I'd rather watch a movie on my phone on a bus, at least I can wear headphones
I saw Megalopolis with 6 other people in the theater and all of them were talking the whole time. I’m just flabbergasted why they would waste their own time with such an odd movie.
>I’m just flabbergasted why they would waste their own time with such an odd movie.
Lots of people don't and many theatres are struggling. If I understand your example, your theatre was 99% empty and you were the only non-talker there, haha.
As you said, a "weird" movie doesn't keep their attention, so they just distracted themselves with their phones to kill the time until the next movie.
As an aside, the funniest instance of this phenomenon I ever encountered was when I was at an evening screening of an incredibly embarrassing idol anime movie at an AMC and two extremely out of place people walked in partway through, lasted about 5 minutes and then had to bail when one of the singing numbers started lol.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
You, who have watched the movie before, want to watch it again and relive the thrills (even if you know the plot), not watch a 10 minute featurette about the movie. If you can still be bothered, you'll stay after the credits. If you cannot be bothered, the featurette wasn't that interesting anyway.
Think about it this way: would you have the excited conversation of "wasn't it cool when so-and-so chopped whathisname's head with the sword!?!?" before or after actually watching the scene as intended?
It really depends on if I have seen the movie, and how recently. If it is going to contextualize the scene for me, then before, so I can think about what they said.
Back when DVD was king, I liked directors commentary where they talked throughout the entire move.
OTOH, video disc menus sometimes do this too. You've got to put some content in the menus, I suppose, but it can easily be too much. I've got a few discs that just dump you straight into the movie, which is often a better choice.
Yes, to be clear I'm not criticizing this. I am pointing out the actual percentage of the audience who would be impacted by this is tiny. Inconveniencing everyone else in the audience by forcing them to sit through the credits if they want to see the bonus content just to give this small group a slightly better experience probably isn't something the theater actually wants to do.
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
That said, I have no clue what the actual percentage is. Maybe someone has A/B tested this
The sky is blue today i eat prawns
As long as HN keeps people with reading skills at all...
The GP directly argued against the blog post, and in favor of showing the extras before the movie, because "majority of Re-release audiences have seen the movie before and don't want to sit through the credits for extras".
(I happen to disagree with the argument on the basis of "who on Earth cares about extras anyway", but still, GP correctly made a coherent point.)
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.
The interview itself? Probably doesn't matter. But for the people involved, it would suck to see no one viewing it.
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.
In most cases the credits are not integral to the artistic vision of the movie. Most people get up and leave when the credits start.
I'm well aware that people leave during the credits.
If you don't want spoilers, then you just don't go in until the published show time.
(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-...
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 avoid trailers like the plague. When reading reviews I'll skip most of it. I want to know the gist of the plot, and I want to know the summary.
I enjoy movies so much more this way. Sure, sometimes I end up watching some duds, but most of the time I'm really engrossed and I love the surprises.
If I watch a trailer, especially the modern 5-minute condensed versions, I find it takes away >90% of the excitement. Doesn't matter if the movie comes out next year, the trailer will come back to me and I will recall the spoiled plot points.
You can pick movies by looking up the film in wikipedia and immediately jumping to "critical response" without reading anything else.
(though I should have paid MUCH more attention with megalopolis)
Knowing nothing about what I’m about to watch is my favorite way.
Haven't seen the film, but read the book. I got what was being depicted (mostly), but yeah, it shows without revealing.
It helps that the story doesn't revolve strictly around action and combat, which many blockbusters do these days.
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.
Were really well made. Kevin Feige just turned 50, and it shows. He lost his edge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8BJ8AufQt8
(arguable She-Hulk spoiler)
I'm going to exaggerate a bit but not much. I have "that friend", I'm sure we all do, who insists there's a reason to watch whichever 5 movie before this one. But it's a movie about fighting. Those 2 minutes of development matters so little to anything that makes the movie what it is. And it was designed for people to be able to follow without having watched anything before it.
So sure they have plot. But it's completely inconsequential. Because fighting.
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.
Even for the subject of the post the only spoiler is the single word "chestburster".
- Start the movie on time - Don't play trailers before the movie - Don't play ads EVER for people paying for their ticket
I suspect that people are more sensitive to ticket prices than they are seeing ads, so if you're trying to maximize revenue, you'd want to limit increases in ticket prices to keep getting viewers in the seats. Then once they are there, try to extract as much additional revenue as possible (concessions, ads, etc). The theaters showing ads aren't trying to attract new viewers, they are trying to extract as much revenue as possible from their existing customers.
(For better or worse)
Unfortunately, the calculus never factors in the fact that it's unsustainable and over time destroys the medium, by changing peoples' and society's relationship with it.
C.f. all the stories about "good old times" that are just remembrance of things before they got enshittificated.
- 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.
I see it as part of a general trend where public spaces are tarnished by a general public that is unable to behave itself.
I think in time the process will accelerate and more and more public spaces will be replaced by private spaces. This is fine for people like myself who can afford such private spaces but I think it’s bad for society which I still have to live in.
It's easy to blame the people, when it comes to the folks who can't stop pulling out their cell phones many of them have been conditioned to act that way from a very young age. If we keep letting companies turn people into anxious iphone addicts it'll only get worse. They can't stay off their phones while driving, asking them to go for an hour and half without looking at their phone violates everything their phone has taught them about how to behave
I've seen good people do it, and be embarrassed by it after I told them to put it away.
It just doesn't make much sense that we've allowed behavioral conditioning to be carried out on the population multiple times a day, every single day, since before they could even read, if we're then going to be mad when some percentage of those people go on to act in exactly the way they've been trained to.
Not everyone has been conditioned to that extent, or will be as susceptible, or at least not as susceptible to it all the time, but this should be the expected outcome. It'd actually be very weird and unexpected if no one ever pulled out their phones in theaters.
TikTok is slowly destroying my sisters life and there is nothing anyone can do about it since she does not think it's a problem and she is an adult.
Zynga and King do not hire psychologists because their products are "accidentally" addictive.
None of this shit is "accidentally" addictive. They explicitly track "engagement" and screen time as metrics to increase.
Addictivity is not an accident! This isn't like with drugs where we just pulled a chemical that already existed out of nature and it just happens to press the same pleasure center buttons as chemicals in our brain.
These companies make their products addicting and addictive on purpose. It is the intended goal of most businesses today.
If I was responsible for maintaining behavior in a public space, say as a restaurateur, the law would not be on my side. If I tell a minority woman that she needs to behave is that a hate crime or criminal misogyny? I'm sure my life would be destroyed while we found out. The state has in effect taken over the role of policing behavior and has done an incredibly bad job of it.
This isn't a figment of my imagination - I was pulled into a tribunal because I expressed amusement at something my female colleague said, I thought it was funny and I thought we were friends, she made a misogyny complaint to hr. Trying to explain why I thought it was funny didn't help nor did the explanation that I would have acted the same if a man had said what she did. I've since avoided working at large companies which has been an impingement on my career but at least I don't have to be stressed each day about some possible perceived microaggression.
Perhaps an intentional community which can use ostracism as a punishment to police behavior could be effective.
No way were there even 10 more people in the theater at 1PM on a Friday.
At least around here, the cinemas are never crowded during the daytime.
Solved by arranging seats so that the backs of the seat in front of you blocks off from seeing anything below the next rows' head level, and so your head is looking at the screen in resting position anyway.
> - assholes who won't shut the fuck up
Solved by turning up the volume.
Big cinemas with large viewing halls have a big advantage over studio cinemas here.
https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=theater+intermissions [VIDEO]
But showing documentary footage that spoils the movie I'm about to watch? Yeah... don't do that.
What's the difference? (Other than the probability of actually at some time watching the movie being spoiled.)
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.
This failed me once where for some odd reason the movie actually started on time, but 1-2% failure rate is mostly acceptable.
(Of course when using an "illegal" player or pirated copy one could avoid it from the start ... a lot better experience)
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
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.
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.
The new 4k UHD bluray movies seem to do this (or almost). and no region coding nonsense.
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.
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 would be like trying to avoid a spoiler for who won the Civil War in a U.S History class.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 also went blind to watch it after school with some friends, it was a mind blowing experience compared to the 90s action movies, everything else in the genre before that just felt bland and unpolished. I went 3 times on the same month with different people to re-watch it.
More recently, when I've had the chance to rewatch the movie I've shifted my awe to the helicopter crash scene [1], which contains so many elements that were unprecedented at the time in an incredibly neat way. It's one of those things where they could have just settled for one of the effects and still do something incredible for the time, but they went ahead and pushed the envelope so much further.
The movie is pretty much that - just the plot would have been sufficient for an incredible film but they had so much creativity to spare that they also reinvented the genre's cinematography because why the hell not?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI4UpBjdJ3s
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
* Alien (1979)
* Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
My wife and I were livid.