Thursday, October 20, 2005

Sneaky Movie Theaters

While I was in Atlanta a few weeks back, I went to see Corpse Bride (which was cute). The theater down there is following the trend of having clever ways of telling people to turn off their cell phones. This one uses a preview for a non-existent movie which gets interrupted by a cell phone. The characters on-screen turn toward the audience and complain about the interruption.

The first time I saw one of these it was imitating some sort of martial-arts genre film. Last time it was animated, but it caught me a little more off guard because I had actually seen a poster for this non-existent movie in the lobby, together with other coming attractions. I double checked on the way out: The poster is there, and it looks fine, but there is no studio information or release dates at the bottom.

The segments are entertaining, but I don't know if they get people to turn off their phones. I have noticed a lot of people in theaters these days playing with their phones through the course of a movie--probably playing games or something similar. There's a bunch of little glowing screens floating around amongst the audience anymore. I'm not sure why these people came anyway.

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