I went to see The Matrix in a theater recently (25th anniversary release I think) and they did the same thing. 10 minute pre-roll of some random person explaining scene by scene why the movie was so great.
I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing after they've already booked the tickets, went to the theater, overpaid for refreshments, and sat to watch it, but I considered it an absurd waste of time.
Also, even though I saw the movie in the theaters on opening week 25 years ago and probably 20+ other times since, it _still_ felt like a spoiler for me. I can't imagine that ever being fun, or interesting, or useful to anyone. I know what I came to see, and why, please just let me watch it.
That movie in particular I feel like if you didn't see in theaters at the time of release that a big part of the experience is completely lost on you. Literally audiences had never seen anything like it.
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.
I saw the band Failure live two years ago a few blocks from where I live. The lights went down shortly after we arrived and a video started playing on the projector wall at the back of the stage. It was a series of interview clips with musicians talking about the band we came to see: how transcendentally amazing Failure was, how incredible the sonic textures on "Fantastic Planet" were, how Ken Andrews is an unappreciated genius, etc. I thought that it would be interrupted after maybe 90 seconds by a loud guitar to kick the show off, but nope - we got to hear Hayley Williams and that Zonie vintner guy who sometimes sings for Tool gush about the band that we were waiting to see for _30 minutes straight_.
At one point I checked my receipt to make sure that we didn't accidentally get tickets to some sort of virtual experience or pre-release screening instead of a concert. The video eventually ended, the band came on, and they gave a great performance. I left feeling more confused than anything; the rest of the crowd's reaction ran the gamut from impassioned to dismissive.
If the art you're putting on display already has a cult following I don't see the need to drive the point home via these weird metatextual commentaries. I'm a weirdo that likes watching movies with crew commentary but I like to do that in my living room, not in a theater.
This reminds me of our VHS box set of the Star Wars trilogy, I believe the second release but before the first special edition. Each movie had a several minute interview with George Lucas *before* the movie. I eventually memorized the timestamp of each film but it was such a waste of time in the aggregate to fast forward through. If they had it at the end sure why not, but before??
Very loosely related: This is exactly how I feel about unskippable tutorials in videogames. I feel like it robs me of the fun when a game explains to me what to do and how.
A Lord of the Rings Extended Edition replay recently went through the theaters a couple of months ago, so I took my two sons, one of which had seen it already, one for which they were new movies.
To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.
No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.
How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.
It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.
> I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing
Because the target public of hollywood movies seems to be idiots. They bring the most money and have relatively low requirements on what constitutes a movie.
One could argue that if a movie is spoiled by someone talking about it, it not that great movie. A great movie is great even if you saw it a dozen times
I agree 100% with the author. I've seen Alien,but I haven't watched it for a long time. So if I go to see it in the cinema now, while I technically do know what's going to happen - it isn't completely fresh in my mind. So to be shown all the suspenseful, scary bits I'm about to watch, out of context, immediately before the film, is absolutely detrimental to the experience.
That was my experience. For the recent rerelease I took my kids to see it for the first time in the theater. And we were treated to 20 minutes of spoilers before the movie started. Thanks, jerks.
I had a similar experience when I popped in an old DVD of Star Wars (i.e. A New Hope) recently. If I recall correctly, there are some short clips and audio that play as part of the intro before you even get to the main menu, and it includes the famous John Williams theme. I hadn't seen the movie in ages, so I wanted to go in fresh, and this totally ruined the experience.
I had the opposite experience when I popped in another old DVD, this time Amadeus. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie. No DVD menu or previews at all. It just felt so good to go straight to the story.
I avoid trailers, even for the movies that I'm not going to see imminently.
Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
(Regarding deceitful, you might've seen amateur trailer cuts that, say, make a light comedy look like a dark thriller, but the professionals were doing that first. How would a director have cut this, if they were making a more marketable picture than was actually made?)
Similarly, I avoid seeing any reviews until either after I've watched the movie, or after I've started and am ready to abort it. I want to experience the storytelling, and also form my own impression, before someone spoils either for me.
I do often vet a title first by looking at its ratings pair on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ (RT), and occasionally I look at the one-sentence review summary blurb. Especially for streaming services in recent years, where the majority of the titles are either mediocre or poor.
(SPOILER ALERT: Though, vetting with RT won't always save you from a bad experience. The other night's evening wind-down light movie, I picked what looked like a generic Jason Statham film, IIRC without vetting. And around halfway in, I was horrified, when the formulaic gruff antihero's redemption-lite arc suddenly reversed, to a double-down of violent and unnecessary pure evil, upon some innocent child. Then I went to skim the RT's summaries of professional reviews, and even none of those summaries warned of this.)
I liked the way Netflix used to automatically start playing whatever show/movie you're hovering over in the app from the first scene. If the first 30-60 seconds pulled you in, you'd continue on to watch the full movie/show without actually clicking "Play" (which also fixed the mental burden of deciding what to watch, since "stop scrolling through options" resulted in automatically playing whatever you landed on).
They've since replaced that with auto-playing trailers which seems to be standard these days. I really like when they just auto-played the movie/show -- most movies/shows already set up the plot decently enough in the first 60-90 seconds (well enough to know whether you want to watch it) and of course that also resolves the "spoiler in trailer" issue.
> Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
This feels like a strange take to me. Trailers are just advertisements for movies, and ads have to both inform about a product and hype it up. Do you also feel spoiled when you see an ad for a new burger because you’ve lost the mystery of what the toppings are? Do you feel deceived because the burger isn’t actually 3 feet wide like it was on the billboard?
It happened to me when I was reading a new edition of ”The Spoils of Poynton” by Henry James.
There was an essay in the beginning of the book that I started reading on inertia alone (yes, I know, I should have known better). In the first paragraph (maybe first sentence), it spoiled the dramatic ending.
Not only that, in the second paragraph it would give an interpretation of what that means. So I was robbed not only of the plot, but also of a interpretation of my own before reading it. I quit the book after those two paragraphs and never read it.
I am still mad at the introduction for “The Idiot” for spoiling as much as possible and analyzing every plot point or emotional moment and then bringing up the author’s life on top of that. I could only imagine anyone who willfully puts these before a work wishes that no one should feel joy from reading. I still overall liked the book, but it could have been so different. I’ve also decided to wait a while to digest books before looking deeper into others’ opinions, including the author’s.
This is super common in introductions for anything that might be called a classic.
If you prefer to go into a work cold and only consult outside help if e.g. something necessary about the setting is unfamiliar in a way that wasn’t intended, as I do, you have to skip those until you’re done.
Movies are even worse. It can be really hard to go in cold to any remotely-popular film, they splash so much advertising and promotion everywhere that gives things away, even if not exactly spoilers.
This happened recently for the screening of The Matrix for its 25th anniversary.
My partner had never seen it, and sure enough they spent almost ten minutes spoiling it with a pointless featurette featuring some unknown new star reminiscing about the movie.
It’s got to be some phenomenon where people can’t understand obvious things. Fully expect some Reddit post with “It’s hinted that Anakin is Luke’s father”.
I think the publishers etc. have identified that audiences actually don’t get stuff unless browbeaten with it.
Hence movie featurettes with spoilers and book introductions that describe the plot.
They’re trying to hit a full 80% of the population and that means you have to go one standard deviation below mean IQ.
The subreddit /r/yourjokebutworse is a showcase of this phenomenon.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe an apochryphal story, but a famous orchestra conductor was talking to the players before a Mozart review show and had this to say:
"Look, I know that professionals like you have been playing this music since you were kids and don't find it very inspiring anymore. And I'll be honest, we do this material to sell tickets and make money for our other more challenging repertoire.
But if you're having trouble finding your passion for this show, please remember that it's a full house, so you can be sure that for some of those people, this will be the first time they hear this music.
And for others in the audience, it will be their last."
I've seen some movies not knowing anything about them by avoiding trailer (this being much easier in the 1990s...) Movies seems to work better that way.
Though it can be jarring: Eg. Silence of the Lambs or Leaving Las Vegas.
I heard once that this is because the creators of the trailers are separate entities from the movie studio. Their job is to sell the movie. They don't care if they have to spoil the whole movie to get you to buy a ticket to see it.
I can usually tell within the first third of a trailer whether I'd like to watch it. In those cases I don't finish the trailer. They give everything away.
It’s similiar to the feeling I get with DVD menus. I sometimes feel like watching some classic movie, and so I put on the DVD. But then the DVD menu already shows all the classic scenes and characters, so when I finally have navigated all the menus and started the movie, I no longer want to watch the movie.
When you go to a movie in towns like LA, Seattle or the Bay Area, you can always tell which people work in the industry because they are the only people who stay to watch the credits. Normal humans all leave when the credits start to roll, with a tiny fraction staying in the hope they include a teaser or surprise bit of story in the middle of the credits. Since the producers of the Alien revival had just spent all their money on the interview, they want to make sure people see it, so they put it before the film.
If it's not high enough value on it's own to keep people in their seats, maybe they should skip it. Or at least not put so much effort into it when only the die hards will enjoy it.
I have recently discovered that there is whole wast segment of human population to whom the concept of spoiler is as alien as the actual aliens. Apparently knowing the finale of the book or a movie in advance is not only ok for them, but actually a thing to strive for, like an optimization puzzle. "You, foolish author, thought I would spend 2 hours on this? Haha, I did it in 15 minutes!"
I don't even argue about that nowadays, those people are from different species, not possible to communicate between us :) .
[+] [-] enobrev|1 year ago|reply
I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing after they've already booked the tickets, went to the theater, overpaid for refreshments, and sat to watch it, but I considered it an absurd waste of time.
Also, even though I saw the movie in the theaters on opening week 25 years ago and probably 20+ other times since, it _still_ felt like a spoiler for me. I can't imagine that ever being fun, or interesting, or useful to anyone. I know what I came to see, and why, please just let me watch it.
[+] [-] busterarm|1 year ago|reply
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.
[+] [-] alexjplant|1 year ago|reply
At one point I checked my receipt to make sure that we didn't accidentally get tickets to some sort of virtual experience or pre-release screening instead of a concert. The video eventually ended, the band came on, and they gave a great performance. I left feeling more confused than anything; the rest of the crowd's reaction ran the gamut from impassioned to dismissive.
If the art you're putting on display already has a cult following I don't see the need to drive the point home via these weird metatextual commentaries. I'm a weirdo that likes watching movies with crew commentary but I like to do that in my living room, not in a theater.
[+] [-] some-guy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|1 year ago|reply
To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.
No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.
How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.
It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.
[+] [-] hulitu|1 year ago|reply
Because the target public of hollywood movies seems to be idiots. They bring the most money and have relatively low requirements on what constitutes a movie.
[+] [-] signalToNose|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorius|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maupin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] allenu|1 year ago|reply
I had the opposite experience when I popped in another old DVD, this time Amadeus. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie. No DVD menu or previews at all. It just felt so good to go straight to the story.
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
Trailers have spoilers (both big and small), and/or are outright deceitful about the movie.
(Regarding deceitful, you might've seen amateur trailer cuts that, say, make a light comedy look like a dark thriller, but the professionals were doing that first. How would a director have cut this, if they were making a more marketable picture than was actually made?)
Similarly, I avoid seeing any reviews until either after I've watched the movie, or after I've started and am ready to abort it. I want to experience the storytelling, and also form my own impression, before someone spoils either for me.
I do often vet a title first by looking at its ratings pair on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ (RT), and occasionally I look at the one-sentence review summary blurb. Especially for streaming services in recent years, where the majority of the titles are either mediocre or poor.
(SPOILER ALERT: Though, vetting with RT won't always save you from a bad experience. The other night's evening wind-down light movie, I picked what looked like a generic Jason Statham film, IIRC without vetting. And around halfway in, I was horrified, when the formulaic gruff antihero's redemption-lite arc suddenly reversed, to a double-down of violent and unnecessary pure evil, upon some innocent child. Then I went to skim the RT's summaries of professional reviews, and even none of those summaries warned of this.)
[+] [-] cj|1 year ago|reply
They've since replaced that with auto-playing trailers which seems to be standard these days. I really like when they just auto-played the movie/show -- most movies/shows already set up the plot decently enough in the first 60-90 seconds (well enough to know whether you want to watch it) and of course that also resolves the "spoiler in trailer" issue.
[+] [-] ileonichwiesz|1 year ago|reply
This feels like a strange take to me. Trailers are just advertisements for movies, and ads have to both inform about a product and hype it up. Do you also feel spoiled when you see an ad for a new burger because you’ve lost the mystery of what the toppings are? Do you feel deceived because the burger isn’t actually 3 feet wide like it was on the billboard?
[+] [-] soneca|1 year ago|reply
There was an essay in the beginning of the book that I started reading on inertia alone (yes, I know, I should have known better). In the first paragraph (maybe first sentence), it spoiled the dramatic ending.
Not only that, in the second paragraph it would give an interpretation of what that means. So I was robbed not only of the plot, but also of a interpretation of my own before reading it. I quit the book after those two paragraphs and never read it.
[+] [-] bashmelek|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vundercind|1 year ago|reply
If you prefer to go into a work cold and only consult outside help if e.g. something necessary about the setting is unfamiliar in a way that wasn’t intended, as I do, you have to skip those until you’re done.
Movies are even worse. It can be really hard to go in cold to any remotely-popular film, they splash so much advertising and promotion everywhere that gives things away, even if not exactly spoilers.
[+] [-] debo_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgeek|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fellowniusmonk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sys32768|1 year ago|reply
My partner had never seen it, and sure enough they spent almost ten minutes spoiling it with a pointless featurette featuring some unknown new star reminiscing about the movie.
My partner closed her eyes and I held her ears.
[+] [-] renewiltord|1 year ago|reply
I think the publishers etc. have identified that audiences actually don’t get stuff unless browbeaten with it.
Hence movie featurettes with spoilers and book introductions that describe the plot.
They’re trying to hit a full 80% of the population and that means you have to go one standard deviation below mean IQ.
The subreddit /r/yourjokebutworse is a showcase of this phenomenon.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bartread|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pwillia7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
(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.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251466/us-movie-theater-...
[+] [-] preinheimer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MrTortoise|1 year ago|reply
so many people say this as if it is a sufficient rebuke of the whole point. OP agrees with you - the point is show it after.
I only pick on you because many people responded but at one time HN had people with critical reasoning skills reading
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|1 year ago|reply
If you don't want spoilers, then you just don't go in until the published show time.
[+] [-] allturtles|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] falcor84|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seanc|1 year ago|reply
"Look, I know that professionals like you have been playing this music since you were kids and don't find it very inspiring anymore. And I'll be honest, we do this material to sell tickets and make money for our other more challenging repertoire.
But if you're having trouble finding your passion for this show, please remember that it's a full house, so you can be sure that for some of those people, this will be the first time they hear this music.
And for others in the audience, it will be their last."
[+] [-] paozac|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|1 year ago|reply
Though it can be jarring: Eg. Silence of the Lambs or Leaving Las Vegas.
The Onion had a good take on it:
https://theonion.com/wildly-popular-iron-man-trailer-to-be-a...
[+] [-] teeray|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] robgibbons|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|1 year ago|reply
Knowing nothing about what I’m about to watch is my favorite way.
[+] [-] yoyohello13|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Izkata|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sitkack|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] danjl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Yizahi|1 year ago|reply
I don't even argue about that nowadays, those people are from different species, not possible to communicate between us :) .
[+] [-] forgotacc240419|1 year ago|reply
Had the effect of making one pair of noisy kids totally lose their attention and proceed to run around the theater for the rest of the film.
Is anyone actually paying to see some recorded q&a? The live ones are usually turgid enough but at least the people are right there
[+] [-] pronoiac|1 year ago|reply
* Alien (1979)
* Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
[+] [-] jerjerjer|1 year ago|reply
Insane how they spoiled the main twist.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE