Despite my genuine fear of zombies (and against my better judgement), I was lured to see Land of the Dead this weekend. Given the sweltering heat outside, the idea of sitting in a dark, air-conditioned room for two hours alone seemed worth the price of admission, and combined with my insatiable hunger for egregiously overpriced nacho and soda “value” combos, the decision was practically made for me. Before you could say “the funk of 40,000 years,” I was sitting in those soft stadium seats, a plastic plate of stale chips and liquicheeze in one hand, and a 400oz Cherry Coke in the other.
Unfortunately, getting to the theater early to get good seats–and getting good seats is of course an imperative when viewing a movie of such high quality–now means also having to endure one of the newer developments in what is a steadily deteriorating moviegoing experience, The Twenty. If you’ve been to a United Artists theater any time within the past year or two, you have most certainly encountered this ingenious marketing creation, but just in case you’ve been fortunate enough to have escaped its clutches, The Twenty is basically twenty minutes (get it?) of loud, obnoxious commercials, some of which are thinly veiled under the guise of being music videos, interviews, or “making of” special features. Using a method comprised of one part Entertainment Tonight, two parts MTV, and three parts each of 1984′s Two Minute Hate and that brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange, the flashy imagery and thundering soundtrack of The Twenty seem to have been carefully calculated to inundate the moviegoer with as much pop garbage as scientifically possible within a twenty minute period of time.
What’s most outrageous about this audio/visual assault is that they actually try to package it as some kind of awesome entertainment programming benevolently provided by our friends at UA. When it’s finally over, and the omnipresent voice gives a brief recap (just in case you’ve forgotten) of the terrible products forced upon the audience, he asks the question, “Did you catch all of The Twenty? If not, try to get to the theater early next time!” It truly does me pain to think that there is even one person on this planet who would heed this advice.
In a world where the film industry is facing sharp declines in theater attendance in favor of in-home viewing, I think that innovations such as this are a strange way to deal with the problem. By eroding the quality of a moviegoer’s experience at the theater–adding commercials before previews, and now commercials before those commercials–it’s no wonder why people would rather just stay home. It’s cheaper (though it’s tough to find that theater-grade liquid cheese at the grocery store), and more comfortable. Theaters should be trying to draw these audiences out of their homes with a positive theatergoing experience–one only the cineplex can provide–not driving them away.
I’m sure these numbers have been meticulously crunched time and again, and I’m sure companies like United Artists have calculated that they make more in advertising revenue with things like The Twenty than they will lose in attendance as a result. I’m sure they have it all figured out. But this strategy seems rather myopic, since it only perpetuates the problem, driving more and more movie watchers away from the theater and into the open arms of Netflix. The Twenty might pull in some badly needed cash for the moment, but I don’t think advertisers pay much to play their commercials in big empty rooms.
Not even air-conditioned ones.
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