Film lovers hate ads – so why do cinemas show so many?

Telegraph

13-03-2025

To the ever louder cries that films are getting too long, I'm here to add a further howl: so is the wait for them to hurry up and start.
Adverts have never been lengthier, more numerous, or less worth seeing on the big screen. Statistically, this tends to be denied – surprise, surprise – by cinema advertising agencies, who have time-honoured ways of fudging the issue. Everybody else knows it to be true.
Forget about your 7pm showtime so that you can be tucked up in bed at a reasonable hour. If the film is, say, Wicked, you won't escape the auditorium these days until 10.15pm. Berate Universal for the film's bloat, by all means, but don't let your chosen cinema chain off the hook.
You might happily tolerate 10 minutes of trailers, even if those too have lost any virtue of brevity they once had. But long before you're whisked off to Oz, you can rest assured that at least 15-20 minutes of arbitrary commercials will first be holding you hostage. (The average wait, according to trade body Digital Cinema Media, is 24 minutes.)
We've always been expected to put up with this. Much like Cillian Murphy at the Oscars, who stood to one side waiting, and waiting, for Adrien Brody to stop speaking, most filmgoers are resigned to having their time egregiously wasted in this way. But not Abhishek M R, an Indian film fan and lawyer from Bengaluru, who last month was awarded damages against the country's largest chain, PVR Cinemas.
The film he was seeing, a 2023 war biopic called Sam Bahadur, was scheduled to end at 6.30pm, but ran half an hour behind, according to the plaintiff, because of 'trailers, advertisements and other fillers'. Arguing that he was caused to miss subsequent appointments, he decided to complain to the Bangalore Urban Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, who ordered PVR to pay him the equivalent of £270 in compensatory damages, as well as £890 in regulatory fines.
All told, Abhishek has done pretty well off his three tickets, totalling £8. But most filmgoers have surely felt his pain at some point. Industry spokespeople always counter that lead-in reels remain an 'integral part' of going out to the cinema, allowing latecomers to shuffle in and find their seats without disrupting the rest of the audience. They even point to customer research which claims to show a majority of viewers (70 per cent!!) consider the pre-amble to be desirable.
Trailers usually start at showtime. If your movie starts at 12 but you get there at 11:30, that's on you. But, the pre-show and trailers need to be cutdown to 10-12 minutes. I sat through 27 minutes of ads before 'COMPANION' started. That's too damn long. @AMCTheatres https://t.co/00cqiiVPkl
— Adam Hlaváč (@adamhlavac) February 10, 2025
You can bet these stats come from bracketing together trailers and ads as if they were one homogenous block of content, which they are not. How would polled customers respond if 30 minutes or, say, 10 were put to them as alternatives? I think we know. If Pearl & Dean's market research study had a sample size of just me, I predict these results: Trailers? OK, but a maximum of three, please. Adverts? Bin the lot.
Of course, cinema advertising affects the operating profits of the exhibitors showing them, or no one would bother. But that's an argument from corporate greed, dressed up as one about an enhanced consumer experience.
The cinema screen is valued real estate, we're told. Because audiences are essentially captive there, all-important levels of engagement are meant to be higher than when the same commercials play on TV.
Here's the problem: levels of aggravation are definitely higher, too. You can't fast-forward them, or use the time to put the kettle on. They're just eating up a chunk of your evening you'll never get back.
To claim that adverts in cinema enjoy a pure claim on our attention is nonsense, anyway. Explicit or tacit, the edict to put your phone away should be crucial etiquette for the film itself. But all I ever see during the advert phase is restless scrolling on socials and rustling around for sweet packets. Who's actively 'engaging' with what's on screen? No one.
Why? 98 per cent of adverts are empirically offensive to the eye and ear, according to the very reputable study above that was conducted on just me. Try to name an enjoyable one screened in 2024, and you may struggle. Even a purported list of the year's best, compiled by Campaign magazine, includes utterly forgettable campaigns for Kia, NatWest, Lego, Google Pixel and the RAF. If the point of advertising is to lodge itself in the mind, these failed totally. The last cinema advert I truly admired, and remember in detail? Jonathan Glazer's black-and-white surfing one for Guinness. That's from 1999.
Senator Martin Looney of Connecticut talks a lot more sense on this subject than you might guess from his name. Looney has lately proposed a bill that would insist cinemas separately list the start times of the programme and the film itself. Advertisers would hate this to be enacted, of course – the last thing they want is everyone punctually arriving just in time for the feature. They want us tricked into rushing to our seats so that we can be treated as gormless receptacles for a solid half-hour.
Looney argues, quite sanely, that our time is being abused as things stand. I'd go further: no one who has bought a ticket to see anything – anything at all – should be force-fed advertising before it starts. If advertising rightly belongs anywhere, it's to fill gaps between things we aren't paying for.
Instead of getting out tiny violins about chains and their operating profits, let's imagine another approach. If you lopped 20 minutes off the programme time, all day long, for every screen in a multiplex, you'd carve out scope to fit in extra showings. For almost everything that isn't The Brutalist or Oppenheimer, anyway.
There's a particular reason that cinema ads also seem more dated than they ever have. We now get targeted by advertisers with terrifying accuracy on Instagram. Somehow, they seem well aware that I'm theoretically interested in a dining room vitrine with frosted glass. So the hit-and-hope mentality of blandly bombarding entire audiences, with no specificity whatsoever, has become so outmoded as to be laughable. I have no need for Chanel No. 5, no matter how fragrant Margot Robbie looks wearing it.
Sometimes we get a near-perfect mismatch. London's BFI Southbank is the capital's premier mecca for treating cinema as high art, attended by habitués who book months ahead for a rare Visconti print, or could tell you the exact duration in seconds of everything in Chantal Akerman' s oeuvre.
They are rather less in the market for a life-affirming Lloyds Bank commercial, which played there routinely for years, featuring a girl on a bike growing up, with black stallions galloping alongside her on coastal paths. As this pablum would come on, I would actively look forward to the strains of Alicia Keys's Girl on Fire fading, drowned out every time by a bellowed 'Rubbish!' from a fuming denizen of the back row.
In the same venue, we've been treated before to an 'immersive', four-minute long, bafflingly indulgent attempt to capture the seven flavour profiles of Hennessy X.O., 'directed' by Ridley Scott, which was capable of sending entire roomfuls of Kurosawa nerds into a bewildered stupor.
The Lloyds one was finally put out to pasture, but has since been replaced by a Rolex one, with James Cameron up on screen pontificating about his quest for the cutting edge. It's even worse. I know from bitter, hilarious experience that there is no more hostile crowd you could possibly pick for Cameron's tech-bro blather than one about to settle in for the amour fou of Visconti's Senso (1954), or basically anything the BFI would ever elect to screen.
So my final plea is twofold. If ads are genuinely unavoidable, at least have the courtesy to make them brief. And for all that's holy, read the room they are going to be played in.