Imagine you’re entering a movie theater. You take your seat with your tub of popcorn and big soda, the flickering light illuminating your face. The joy and thrill of seeing a movie in the theater always comes with a moment of anticipation: the trailers that come before the movie. Now there are commercials as well. Still, it’s all part of the experience, right? We go in knowing that there will be a few minutes of movie trailers and commercials before the movie starts. People who are chronically late count on this 10- to 15-minute buffer. State Senator Martin Looney, a Democrat from Connecticut, is trying to change all that. He has proposed a bill that would require movie theaters to list movies’ REAL start times, not when the trailers and commercials start. This means that a theater’s website would have to list both the time the ads and trailers begin and the time the actual film begins — something like: “A Complete Unknown” 7 p.m. (film starts at 7:12 p.m.). According to Senator Looney, the ads and trailers are an abuse of people’s time, so listing the actual start time of the film provides people with the option of sitting through the fluff at the beginning, or showing up at the time the actual film starts. Of course, ads and trailers are part of the revenue for some theaters at a time when movie ticket sales haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic, so theaters aren’t thrilled about the idea. They say trailers before the main attraction allow movie lovers to learn about new movies. It remains to be seen whether movie listings will change in the future, or whether tradition will reign.
