> don't want to sit through the credits for extras.
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.
I think the interview is filmed primarily for the ability to say it exists on marketing copy, thus hopefully sell more tickets. It offer something "new" that differentiates the cinema screening of an old movie from any of the alternative (legal or otherwise) ways of viewing it.
The interview itself? Probably doesn't matter. But for the people involved, it would suck to see no one viewing it.
I'd expect there would be plenty of people who would choose to view it. For "Alien" I'd expect a big chunk of the audience would be people who have only seen it on home media but became huge fans and have watched it many times. They would know every scene, so nothing in the pre-movie extras would be a spoiler for them.
Not necessarily. People often make purchase decisions based on overall feeling, versus specific, discrete benefits - they'll choose a "fuller experience" because it feels more complete, and then end up not bothering to go beyond the "basic package".
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.
So, the first time I went to see it I was there by chance, because it was in an amusement park and I really didn't know the first thing about what I was getting into.
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 :)
At the 25 year mark? A sizable part of the movie-going audience wasn't even born then.
(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.)
> but at one time HN had people with critical reasoning skills reading
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.)
I was making an argument for before. If 90% of customers want it before so they dont have to sit through credits, it is very understandable that it is shown before.
That said, I have no clue what the actual percentage is. Maybe someone has A/B tested this
Whenever I've seen theaters do this type of thing, they do it before the published show time. Related content first, then at the published show time trailers start, then a bit later the actual movie starts.
If you don't want spoilers, then you just don't go in until the published show time.
> and don't want to sit through the credits for extras
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.
Showing my age here. A family member of mine used to run a local theater. The booth had multiple projectors, because films came on multiple reels (and once you knew what to look for, you could not unsee the reel switch indicators). So we've had the technology for a long time to pause a feature before the credits and roll another featureette and then switch back.
That’s actually a big no-no in cinema. You don’t just splice a movie you’re showing to insert stuff, much like museums don’t usually draw on their paintings. Showing the work as the creator intended is the whole point.
I absolutely disagree. As three article mentioned, a big draw of these screenings is for a person who watched and loved a film to take a friend or family member who hasn't yet.
I agree, or else you're going to see the film again in person for the experience of being in a theater with a whole bunch of other people and seeing it on a very big screen. I don't think the draw for me to see a film again in the theater is the fact that there will be an intro discussion on it. That just seems like pure marketing to give a value-add to the experience, but I doubt most people going are there for that.
It's pretty easy to make almost everybody happy, because almost nobody wants to see the extras anyway, and certainly not before the movie.
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?
>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.
Did you usually watch DVDs with running commentary alone or with other watchers? And when you got the DVD, did you watch the movie first as intended and later with commentary, or did you jump to the commentary straight away?
Yes, the author has a good point in a vacuum, but used a bad example to highlight that point in practice. Even for the minority of the audience who hasn't seen the movie yet, they almost certainly know what happens due to cultural osmosis. Children are probably the only group who could potentially be spoiled and let's just say I don't think the rerelease of 40+ year old R rated movie is necessarily targeted at children.
I mean, I've got a kid and love when I can take him to see a rerelease of a culturally significant movie when the content is appropriate. Spoilers in the pre-rolls are definitely an issue. Even if it's just me going, some of the movies I go to see are movies where I've seen bits and pieces here and there and cultural osmosis, but it can be a bit of a bummer to have the 5 minute rehash of the film before seeing the whole thing.
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.
Right. My 13 year-old's seen Jurassic Park on TV enough times but I still took him to the theatrical re-release because I figured he'd want to see it on a gigantic screen with dinosaurs towering overhead, and I was right.
>I mean, I've got a kid and love when I can take him to see a rerelease of a culturally significant movie when the content is appropriate. Spoilers in the pre-rolls are definitely an issue.
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.
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.