That’s right.  Audience abuse.  Maybe the subject matter of this blog will not be suitable for all ages.  Parental discretion advised.

According to the theater’s published showtime, we arrived five minutes early to the late-afternoon showing of Arrival (sci-fi drama with Amy Adams) at our local cineplex.  We got our seats and were promptly greeted with a Coke commercial, followed by a five-minute promo for some Disney film called Moana with Dwayne Johnson (it looks like South Pacific action figures will be hot this Christmas) and finally, fifteen minutes of trailers for upcoming films.  And one more Coke commercial for good measure.

So we sat there a total of twenty minutes post-showtime, forced to watch advertisements for movies we never intend to see, while waiting for the feature we paid for to begin.

I know that advertising is part of the deal in movie theaters these days, but expecting us to sit through twenty minutes of it constitutes audience abuse.  The endless string of trailers put me in a decidedly bad mood by the time the movie finally started.  I hardly think that this is the experience film-makers hope to deliver to their audiences.  To me, it seems like another reason to stay home and surf the internet while my wife watches Netflix.

P.S.  I’m also tired of all those thunderous low-frequency rumbles and crashes that the sound-guy throws into every action sequence in every film.  (Does the same guy do the sound for all of them?)  But that’s another complaint for another day.