Denial, Brought to You by AMC Theatres
Plus: Rachel Zegler's empty H'wood dance card, decoding the streamers' billboards, the return of Mel Brooks and comedy's iceberg
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of takes on the industry’s passing parade.
“Denial is not just a river in Egypt” should probably be this column’s tagline.
If we were rearranging the deck on the Titanic, at least we’d be accomplishing something – something futile and ridiculous given the circumstances, but at least you’d have a new floorplan to take to the vasty deep. Here, it feels more like sending out a Slack message to ask what times fellow Titanic members might be available to get together and toss around some ideas for rearranging the deck chairs. In this week’s news, in other words, the band plays on…
I. AMC Tests Just How Bad It Can Get
Usually, when you are facing unsteady waters with your customer base, that’s a time to step up your game — show them just how great you can be, wowing them at every turn.
However, even as the film industry lurches and wobbles, there’s another trend afoot in the larger corporate world. It’s their reigning ethos these days; what culture critic Ted Gioia has referred to as the Annoyance Economy – the practice of companies that feel they have a captive audience, steadily making their service worse in order to drive customers to premium tiers. The hellish condition of coach seats is an example of this, as are the ad tiers of streaming services.
Some of our movie chains, or this week the big one, seem to aspire to join the annoyance revolution. This week, AMC announced that it would kick off a new level of pre-show commercials in its theaters:
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. has agreed to run more advertising in its theaters, ending its yearslong opposition to commercials that come right before each movie.
The largest US theater chain, AMC reached an agreement with National CineMedia Inc. to run the spots, according to a statement Tuesday. National CineMedia owns and operates an ad network in major theater chains, including AMC, Cinemark Holdings Inc. and Regal Cinemas.
It sometimes feels like they are daring audiences to escape.
The problem, of course, is that AMC does very much not have a captive audience. It has a potential audience of possible moviegoers, the vast majority of whom, in any given month, choose not to use their service. Charging people a good amount of money when you add it all up to make them sit and watch commercials, at this moment in the evolution of media, seems like a choice that people will look back on and say, what did they expect would happen?
(For their part, AMC says the ads in their competitors’ theaters had no impact. My response: Nothing has an impact until it does.)
The audience is, of course, wary of all this. If you’ve been to an AMC theater lately, you’ve seen that the seats are nearly empty at the official showtime, as people know they have a full half hour before the thing they paid for actually begins. That sort of game of chicken with your customers, at a time of endless entertainment options in the palm of their hands, does not end happily for anyone.
II. Mel in the Rear View Mirror
This week, we learned that another Mel Brooks classic is getting a new treatment. A Very Young Frankenstein project is coming together at FX, which, given that it’s by the What We Do in Shadows team, I’m sure it will be hilarious.
In the past few years, we’ve had a new chapter of History of the World, Part 1 and a Spaceballs sequel put into the works. This follows the runaway Broadway success of the musical version of Brooks’ The Producers.
While the resurgence of Melostalgia is heartening, it’s remarkable to note that even as Hollywood revels in his classics, nothing remotely like that's being made today. Not only would Brooks’ films not get made, but nothing in the same genre would be greenlit. And by the same genre, I mean all of comedy.
Well, the lone studio exception this year — Paramount’s The Naked Gun reboot — debuts in August. We’ll see if one movie can keep half of the cultural spectrum alive all by itself.
Ahead: Sydney Sweeney, Rachel Zegler and the best of the 21st century. But first…
III. Showtime Me the Way To Go Home
