Fair Exchange
I just got back from seeing Hellboy in a movie theater, and it was fantastic. Almost good enough, in fact, to be worth going to a movie theater to see it. Eventually. After fifteen minutes of being advertised at, that is. (Plus the amount of time that the asinine "advertainment" slideshow played on the screen before that.) During that fifteen minutes, I kept digging my ticket stub out of my pocket, simply to confirm that I had, in fact, paid money for the privilege of being shown a bunch of extended-length commercials, trailers, and pure asinine propaganda. I will begin to consider showing respect for copyright when the holders of copyright make some pretense of showing respect for me.
Really, is there somewhere that I can go and simply pay a fair price to be shown a first-run movie without being sold to advertisers in turn? I understand that broadcast television is a manufacturing process, in which human beings are converted into viewers which can then be sold to advertisers. (Somehow, paying a cable company to transport this manufacturing process into my home does not seem completely insane. Yet.) However, if I am paying an entertainment venue out of my owm pocket, I want to be a customer, not a product. If said venue wants to gouge me out of more money, that's fine, at least to the extent that I will make an informed choice about what I expect to receive for my money.
I'll probably be back in the theater in a few months (maybe when Spiderman 2 comes out). That ought to be long enough to forget why I haven't set foot in a movie theater in the meantime.
The movie itself was very good. But I went to a 10:30 showing and didn't get out of there until 1 am. That means it didn't start at 10:30.
I go with friends and spend time heckling the commercials. Or making that last run to the bathroom before anything really starts. Usually we split the consession duties -- one person has the job to secure seats, thus having to sit through the majority of ads, while the other person(s) purchase and haul all the snack items, meaning they don't see the ads, but have to hunt in the dark for where their seats are - and of course complain about them.
I judge movies purely on "Can I wait to see this" vs "Does this REQUIRE a big screen/deafening soundsystem". One day I will have a wide screen format plasma TV and I will no longer wonder this question. I will just sit very, very close.
If it weren't for people like you and the Foywonder, I'd forget how lucky I am that the cinemas near here (that is, here in Chambersburg and down in Hagerstown) mostly limit themselves to showing trailers and the Theatre Etiquette Reminder™.