The wife and I went out to see The Odyssey today. It was a good movie, with good performances. They got the story of Odysseus’ journey back to Ithica essentially correct. I recommend that you watch it should you get the opportunity.
What I want to talk about, though, is the pre-movie ads. I get that movie theatres aren’t doing as well post-Covid as they did before. I mean, this movie is supposed to be one of the ‘summer blockbusters’. There were only four people, including the wife and I, in the theatre. Now admittedly, classic Greek myths don’t have the same widespread audience appeal as Spider-man, who also has a movie opening this weekend. (Tom Holland is in both movies). I can understand everyone who might have wanted to watch the Odyssey having already seen it, as it opened several weeks ago.
Movie theatres need to make money just like every other business. Showing ads before movies has been a movie going experience for quite a while now. I get that.
The ads used to start well before the movie. Like, up to forty minutes before the movie started. Today however, they started just under ten minutes before the movie. The time the movie should have started rolled around. The ads kept going. Ten minutes later, they finally stopped.
Then we got to the trailers for upcoming movies. Yes, I understand that movie theatres wat to entice you to come see more movies and trailers are how they do it. I love a good trailer. I rarely watch a movie (unless it is one the wife has found on streaming and starts watching before I can do so) without watching the trailer first.
A few trailers are OK. But this went on for a little over twenty minutes. This caused the movie to start more than a half hour after its scheduled start time. The wife was getting bored and antsy waiting for the movie to start. We don’t see movies in the theatre very often but after we got out of seeing this one she said we should arrive to any other movies from now on fifteen minutes late.
It used to be that movies would have all this done and out of the way before the movie was supposed to start. Even then, they might show two or three more trailers before starting the movie, but the movie would start mostly on time.
The Odyssey is almost three hours long. Sitting that long is getting a little more difficult for me at my age. Sometimes I get up after siting that long and I’m stiff. It takes a few steps to get going. It’d be nice if the theatres would shift the ads and trailers back to before the showtime of the movie.
Yeah, I’m old. And cranky. Get off my lawn!
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