Studios: Please don't spoil the movie we are seated to see
fxrant.blogspot.com
fxrant.blogspot.com
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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 cancelled my Netflix subscription over that feature... If I want to watch it, I'll press play.
Wasn't and act of impulse either, it annoyed the heck out of me for at least half a year before I had enough.
Haven't had a good reason to come back.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Even for the subject of the post the only spoiler is the single word "chestburster".
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.
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.
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.
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-...
"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."
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.
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.
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.
(Of course when using an "illegal" player or pirated copy one could avoid it from the start ... a lot better experience)
I don't even argue about that nowadays, those people are from different species, not possible to communicate between us :) .
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 all my personal opinion of course.
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?
So my guess answer is - the social pressure finally rose high enough that there is now critical mass of people who care about spoilers and got spoiled a few times by official media. That's why there are more posts about this. More instances of the issue multiplied by vastly bigger market due to cheap internet and streaming.
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
* Alien (1979)
* Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Insane how they spoiled the main twist.
This failed me once where for some odd reason the movie actually started on time, but 1-2% failure rate is mostly acceptable.
- 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 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...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/sony-pic...
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.
My wife and I were livid.
As a parent, I simply loved that opening line.
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.
By the way, did you know Jesus dies at the end of the Bible.
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.