The Direct Message
Tension: Movie theaters run 30 minutes of ads before films, but the audience has learned to skip them, meaning the advertising plays to empty seats while training customers to disengage from the theatrical experience entirely.
Noise: The debate gets framed as ‘people hate ads’ versus ‘theaters need revenue,’ but the real issue is a feedback loop where short-term revenue extraction accelerates the long-term decline in attendance that makes the ads necessary in the first place.
Direct Message: When the gap between what’s promised (a 7:15 showtime) and what’s delivered (a 7:45 movie) becomes predictable, the audience doesn’t complain — they adjust. And some of them adjust by never coming back.
Every DMNews article follows The Direct Message methodology.
Research suggests that moviegoers have learned, through repetition, exactly how long they can delay before the film they paid for actually begins—often arriving well after the posted showtime to skip advertisements and trailers.
They are not alone, and the people who run movie studios know it.
At CinemaCon this month, Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tom Rothman stood in front of an audience of theater owners and told them, in language that left little room for interpretation, to stop doing the thing that pays a significant chunk of their bills. According to reports, Rothman urged theater owners to reduce advertising and shorten pre-show content. The pre-movie block now runs approximately 30 minutes in many theaters. Half an hour of content that exists before the content the customer chose and paid for. Rothman framed this as an existential problem: the trailers designed to sell upcoming films are playing to empty seats because experienced moviegoers have figured out the system.
The advertising is rendering itself invisible.
This is not a complaint about commercials being annoying. That’s an old argument, and it leads nowhere productive. What Rothman identified is something more structurally interesting: a feedback loop in which the revenue model of the exhibitor is actively undermining the marketing model of the distributor. The theater sells ad time. The studio buys ad time. The audience learns to avoid ad time. The studio’s investment evaporates. The theater pockets the ad revenue anyway. And the audience arrives at a movie they almost didn’t bother seeing in theaters at all.
Psychologists have a term for what happens when a stimulus is repeated so often that it stops producing a response: habituation. The first time you see a trailer in a darkened theater, projected at massive scale with booming surround sound, the experience is genuinely thrilling. That’s why movie trailers became a beloved cultural form in the first place. But the thrill depends on scarcity and context. Thirty minutes of them, preceded by advertisements for local dental practices and Coca-Cola, kills the context entirely. The trailer becomes background noise. The ad becomes a cue to check your phone.
Rothman’s plea at CinemaCon was unusual because studio heads rarely criticize exhibitors publicly. The two sides of the movie business have a codependent relationship that requires diplomatic language. Studios need theaters to show their films. Theaters need studios to make films people want to see. But the diplomatic period may be ending. Box office attendance still trails pre-pandemic levels, despite early 2026 successes like Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Project Hail Mary. The audience that hasn’t come back is not waiting for a better movie. They’re waiting for a better experience.
The advertising problem is part of a larger pattern in which institutions optimize for revenue extraction at the expense of the relationship that generates the revenue in the first place. Audiences increasingly want transparency about what they’re actually getting before they commit their time and money. When a ticket says 7:15 and the movie starts at 7:45, the ticket is lying. Not dramatically. Not maliciously. But consistently enough that the customer adjusts their behavior to compensate, and in doing so, removes themselves from the very marketing funnel the theater sold to the advertiser.
Some independent cinema operators have responded by keeping pre-show blocks shorter—around 12 minutes of trailers with no commercials. Their ticket prices are slightly higher. Their concession margins are thinner. But their audiences arrive on time. The fact that customers know when the movie actually starts has become a selling point—the economics of trust in action. The large chains offer a lower ticket price but extract the difference through your attention, selling it to advertisers who may not realize they’re buying access to an increasingly empty room.
Rothman also emphasized that affordability is a major concern for moviegoers. This complicates the picture. If theaters cut advertising revenue, they need to make it up somewhere, and the most obvious place is the ticket price. The customer who hates the 30-minute pre-show might also balk at a $22 ticket. The theater is caught between two versions of the same dissatisfied person.
But this framing assumes a static audience, one where the number of people willing to go to theaters is fixed and the only question is how to distribute the cost. Rothman’s argument, and it is one the data supports, is that the experience itself is what’s shrinking the audience. Fix the experience and more people show up. More people showing up generates more ticket and concession revenue. The advertising dependency becomes less necessary.
It is a version of the same argument playing out across every attention-based industry. Streaming services that front-load ads before their own original content. Podcasts that open with four minutes of sponsor reads before the host says a word. Social media platforms where organic content is increasingly buried under paid placements. The pattern is always the same: the entity controlling distribution squeezes the attention channel until the audience routes around it, at which point the channel’s value to advertisers drops, at which point the entity squeezes harder. Timing and context determine whether content actually reaches its audience, and the movie theater pre-show has become a case study in getting both wrong.
Rothman also advocated for longer theatrical windows, keeping movies in cinemas before they move to streaming. And he made a case for original storytelling alongside franchise filmmaking. Sony’s 2026 slate reflects this tension directly: franchise entries like the next Spider-Man and Jumanji alongside original projects like The Breadwinner, Klara and the Sun, and The Nightingale.
The franchise-versus-originality debate is well worn, but what’s less discussed is how the theater experience itself determines which films benefit from theatrical release. A quiet, character-driven adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun requires an audience that arrives present, attentive, ready to be absorbed. Thirty minutes of sensory bombardment from insurance companies and superhero trailers is the worst possible preparation for that kind of film. The pre-show doesn’t just annoy the audience. It trains them to be in the wrong cognitive state for the very movies the industry says it wants to protect.
Rothman characterized the theater industry’s reliance on advertising revenue as an addiction. The metaphor is blunt but accurate in one specific way. Addiction describes a behavior that provides short-term relief while accelerating long-term decline. Pre-show advertising fills a revenue gap today. It widens the attendance gap tomorrow.
The theater industry’s problem is not that people don’t like movies. The 2026 box office has proven, once again, that the right film can fill seats. The problem is that the space between buying a ticket and watching a movie has become adversarial. It is a half hour in which the customer is the product being sold, and they know it. They may not articulate it that way. They may just say the experience takes too long, or conclude that waiting for streaming is preferable. But the underlying calculation is clear: the theater has not earned the attention it is extracting.
People develop elaborate coping strategies when systems consistently fail to respect their time and attention. Audiences arrive late, check their phones, or disengage before the feature begins. Each of these responses is rational. Each of them is also a quiet withdrawal from the relationship the theater industry depends on.
Trust, once broken through small daily betrayals, is expensive to rebuild. A showtime that means what it says would be a start. A pre-show that respects the audience’s presence instead of monetizing their captivity would be another. These are not radical changes. They are, in a sense, a return to something the movie theater used to offer without thinking about it: the simple promise that when you sit down, the show begins.
