When does the movie really start?

If you're like me, you're always torn between showing up for a movie early, and getting the best seat possible, or showing up 15 minutes after start time, and skipping the commercials. Some theatres are worse than others when it comes to actually showing movies "on time." My local "megaplex" is eerily timed to start movies 17-20 minutes after their start time. If it's not a new release, and it's a matinee, I'll show up at 4:20 for that 4:05 film, and have plenty of time to find a seat and maybe catch the last preview.

When I was a kid, I saw maybe two trailers, a commercial for concessions, and then *boom* the movie starts. Now there are ads running 30 minutes before the show starts, and there are even 15 minutes of ads after the lights are dimmed. You get all of the trailers, of course, but then there's advertisements for local business, some kind of soda drink, online ticketing, a charity or two, and then a long and boring reminder not to smoke, throw your trash on the floor, and shut up.

Now a Connecticut State Representative has said "enough's enough," and is proposing legislation that would require movie theatres in the state to post the actual starting time of a movie. Saying that the incessant advertising has "robbed us of our freedom of choice because we're not told when the actual movie will begin," Rep. Andrew Fleischmann believes that movie-goers have the right to know when a movie will actually start, since they are paying to see it. The complaint comes at a time when movie theatres are tapping into the lucrative captive audience advertising format. The Cinema Advertising Council reports that on-screen advertising grew from an already impressive US $191 million in 2002 to $315 million in 2003, up 45%. You can expect the theatres to respond to such proposals with a now-familiar rejoinder: publishing movie starting times will reduce people watching ads, which means that the theaters "will have to" raise ticket and food prices.