I Go to the Movies Apparently to Watch TV

My wife and I went to see the movie Hangover a few weeks ago. It was a pretty good movie, by the way.

The problem is that we paid quite a bit of money to get in; anyone who has been to the theater lately knows what I'm talking about. We didn't see the matinee time. We went in at a late-night showing. It was a multi-cinema theater, not a small town 2-screen theater; a major name place who shares its name with an adjective for a monarchy.

We sat down around 8:00 in our seats. The lights dim.

We watched over 20 minutes of commercials and previews.

Previews I don't mind so much. I sometimes enjoy seeing peeks of what's coming up soon. But commercials?

This theater already shows a loop of some trivia and information before the movie starts...I don't count that since if you're ten minutes early, you're going to have 10 minutes of that loop. I do get slightly irked at the whole, "this movie trivia is brought to you by Coca-Cola" thing they have going on, but hey...I have some control over how much of that I'm exposed to.

But when the movie is supposed to start it would be nice if the movie started.

Worse, they're showing commercials. Actual commercials. For cars and trucks. And soda.

WHY?

I don't want any of that crap just because they're ticking me off when I came here to see a @#$ movie. I associate their products with being annoying crap now.

Because they're actual commercials. Like what I see on TV. As in the reason we're paying a big bundle of cash to sit in the theater and get away from them in the first place.

In a time when people are literally turning their living rooms into small theaters with surround sound and projectors or ginormous LCD televisions, why would theaters go out of their way to try turning their theaters into giant living rooms by creating a crappy viewing experience? I could pay a boatload of money to watch pay per view in my underwear at home. I'm paying a quite a bit more to sit in your theater and be forced to sit through you trying to push the same commercials on me that I get already at home.

Basically it's a reason I don't go to the theater unless it's a movie I really want to see. Otherwise I wait for it to come out on DVD. I am simply too irritated at the onslaught of ads that waste my time and worse, I'm paying them to irritate me. It's a personal pet peeve.

Incompetent fast food restaurants led me to simply stop going to them and tell other people how crappy they are. If I keep getting this from theaters I think I'm going to add them to my craplist as well. I'm very close to sending a letter to the CEO asking he or she to pull his or her head from his or her butt and stop showing me the same crap I already get on my TV at home.