Remember when you looked forward to those handful of sneak previews before the feature film was shown? (I used to love that General Cinema Theatres jingle.) Today a film can be delayed by almost half an hour thanks to movie trailers—and that doesn’t even count the lights-on commercials. The reasons are obvious.
As Steve Knopper notes in the Wall Street Journal,
Advertisers would be hard-pressed to find a more captive audience than a movie audience, stuck in a dark room where texting and tweeting is still (technically) verboten. Pitching movies of a similar genre to a group of people who have already paid $10 to be wowed is like selling umbrellas in a downpour.
Which is why I showed up late when I took my son to Madagascar 3. Come to think of it, I shouldn’t have shown up at all (although I did find that Russian tigress strangely attractive).