This past weekend, Owen and I went to the theater to see X-Men: Apocalypse at Carmike Cinema in Oakdale. The “showtime” was 7:10. When I purchased the tickets at 7:00, the employee at the box office informed me that I was plenty early since the film didn’t actually start until after 7:30. You know there’s gonna be a lot of ads when employees have taken to warning patrons about the wait!
So Owen and I first peeked into the theater and, seeing plenty of open seats, we decided to walk around a bit and see what else was playing. With 16 screens pretty much everything you’d want to see was there: both sequels and remakes!
But wanting to get a good seat, after about 5 minutes we moseyed back into the theater and took our place. I let Owen pick the seats. Then I sat down to watch the movie.
But before the movie started we were first treated to…
-A Netflix ad
-A hotels.com ad
-An informative segment telling us to locate the exits
-An ad for Ice Age 12: Even crappier than the other 11
-A trailer for Jason Bourne 12
-An American Express commercial, in which Tina Fey impulse buys thousands of dollars at a fitness store, to show that she’s just like a regular person
-An ad for The Runner
-An ad for King of Queens 2: Kevin Can Wait
-An ad for Extra Gum
-An ad inviting us if we’d like to meet new people and kill them (aka, “The Air Force”)
-A Taco Bell ad that’s somehow supposed to entice us with a steak taco for $1.49
-A commercial for Starburst
-An ad for No Man Left Behind
-A State Farm ad in which a kid is riding his bike down the street and, when he lets go of the handlebars, there’s a disclaimer at the bottom that says – I kid you not – “do not attempt.”
-An ad for Mazda
-An ad for Verizon
-An ad for Geico
-An ad about the ads (which they call “Front + Center”)
-An ad for Chevy
-A reminder to find the exits, which was completely unnecessary since that’s all I’d been thinking about since the last exits reminder
-An ad reminding us that, while talking on our phones during a movie is obnoxious, using our phones to take pictures of the movie is illegal. Because even though talking in a movie is a bigger offense to most people, photographing the screen is a bigger offense to really rich people.
-An ad for Carmike Cinema…the very theater I was sitting in
-Another ad for Ice Age 12: The Squirrel and the Nut is Still Stupid
-An ad for The Secret Life of Pets (think Toy Story meets Bolt)
-An ad for The Suicide Squad
-Another ad for Jason Bourne
-An ad for Star Trek: The Search for Original Scripts
-An ad for Ghostbusters: Original, Evidently, Because Women
-An ad for Coca-Cola set to Queen’s “Under Pressure”
-An ad for Vitamin Water
-An ad for Carmike Cinema…the very cinema I have, by now, sworn to never attend again
-An ad for Coca-Cola which, I’m sure, raised the audience’s awareness of Coca-Cola by 0%
-And an blurb from the actress who plays Storm, telling us that lots of people are required to make movies.
…The movie probably started sometime after that, but it was getting late so we had to leave.
Just kidding. The flick finally commenced at 7:32. Or, at least, the Twentieth-Century Fox logo and an assortment of other financial contributors’ logos commenced.
I thought running (non-movie trailer) commercials before movies was a fad that came and went. I guess it was just that I had changed theater chains.
It never left as far as I can tell.
I still remember the first time I saw a non-movie-related commercial prior to a film. I thought, “Well this is stupid.” My opinion hasn’t changed. If I wasn’t such a stickler about having the perfect seats at a theater, I’d purposely arrive 20 minutes late all the time.