Yahoo News: Loews Goes Reel Time
By Josh Grossberg Wed May 4, 8:47 PM ET
Hate going to the movies and having a commercial-a-thon break out?
This might be the news you’ve been waiting for.
Coming soon to a theater near you: actual start times for feature presentations.
In response to gripes from customers about the increasing number of ads, PSAs, promotions and sneak previews running before a film, Loews, the nation’s third-largest theater chain, has announced that it will soon start publicizing the real times that movies unspool.
But there’s a catch. Beginning next month, Loews will include in its newspaper and Web listings a note alerting customers that “the feature presentation starts 10 to 15 minutes after the posted show time.”
I do sympathise with customers who feel we trick them into arriving too early and bombarding them with adverts but it isn’t a simple task to actually post the times of the start of the movie.
All the times quoted for films at our cinema are for the start of the full performance including the adverts and trailers because they are of variable length it is never certain quite when the main feature will start so we never post the time for it.
Also just to complicate matters any performance for a movie that is only playing once or twice in a week will probably not have any adverts or trailers as we only have a limited number and it is too much hassle for the projectionist to detach them from another print to play with such a movie.
However as a small cinema that isn’t part of a major chain we tend to play far fewer actual adverts and customers generally quite enjoy the trailers for forthcoming features in any case.
Tags: cinema
