Cory Doctorow on movie theaters' ridiculous treatment of paying customers
Cinemas as police-states: why box-office revenue is in decline?
Film previews in Hollywood have long been a police-state affair: turn up at the movies, get frisked, have your valuable phone (which in turn contains your very, very valuable identity) confiscated and entrusted to a teenager earning minimum wage, and then be overtly surveilled through the course of the film.
Now the Hollywood police-state experience has come to Toronto, as James Reid discovered at last week's preview of Derailed. Viewers were wanded with metal-detectors, frisked, had their property confiscated, and so on. The thing is, these measures are becoming more common in regular screenings, too. A ticket-taker at Toronto's Paramount cinema tried to confiscate my still camera last year when he saw me taking pics of my friends in the lobby with it. Sorry, no. You can't have my $500 camera to keep until your $5 matinee is over.
It shouldn't amaze me, but it does. The thing that keeps people turning up at the cinema is the cinema experience -- big screens, the companionship of others, the show of it all. Souring that show with stupid, insulting anti-piracy ads (um, why are you showing condescending, threatening ads to the people who paid money to see the movie -- shouldn't you be targeting the people who don't buy tickets?) is bad enough.
But converting cinemas into airport security zones and asking ushers to act like Sky Marshals is positively suicidal. What fantasyland are MPAA executives inhabiting in which treating your customers like criminals makes them want to go on spending their money at your business?
Film previews in Hollywood have long been a police-state affair: turn up at the movies, get frisked, have your valuable phone (which in turn contains your very, very valuable identity) confiscated and entrusted to a teenager earning minimum wage, and then be overtly surveilled through the course of the film.
Now the Hollywood police-state experience has come to Toronto, as James Reid discovered at last week's preview of Derailed. Viewers were wanded with metal-detectors, frisked, had their property confiscated, and so on. The thing is, these measures are becoming more common in regular screenings, too. A ticket-taker at Toronto's Paramount cinema tried to confiscate my still camera last year when he saw me taking pics of my friends in the lobby with it. Sorry, no. You can't have my $500 camera to keep until your $5 matinee is over.
It shouldn't amaze me, but it does. The thing that keeps people turning up at the cinema is the cinema experience -- big screens, the companionship of others, the show of it all. Souring that show with stupid, insulting anti-piracy ads (um, why are you showing condescending, threatening ads to the people who paid money to see the movie -- shouldn't you be targeting the people who don't buy tickets?) is bad enough.
But converting cinemas into airport security zones and asking ushers to act like Sky Marshals is positively suicidal. What fantasyland are MPAA executives inhabiting in which treating your customers like criminals makes them want to go on spending their money at your business?
posted by LexMonkey at 11/10/2005 04:00:00 PM ||
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