The good news: AMC Entertainment's CEO has changed his mind. After telling an interviewer he was open to allowing texting during movies, he has been informed this was a terrible idea and now says it won't happen.
The bad news: There's no reason to believe there won't still be texting during screenings, rules or no, while we continue to tsk-tsk and give the evil eye.
"We have heard loud and clear that this is a concept our audience does not want," AMC CEO Adam Aron said in a statement that leaves you free to imagine a forced smile, bloodshot eyes and a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead.
"In this age of social media, we get feedback from you almost instantaneously and as such, we are constantly listening," the statement said. "Accordingly, just as instantaneously, this is an idea that we have relegated to the cutting room floor. With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theatres. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future."
Those all-capital letters are Aron's, not ours, but he might want to go easy on the "foreseeable future" business in any case.
Less than 48 hours earlier, in an interview with Variety, the future Aron foresaw plainly anticipated a new generation of moviegoers becoming pre-eminent, millennials succeeding post-World War II baby boomers, and the ascendance of their predilections.
"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow," Aron told Variety. "You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That's not how they live their life."
The only thing that changed between now and then is those who view a movie theater as a safe space from the world of multiscreen distractions shared their sentiment with the kind of swift, strong intensity usually reserved for things Donald Trump says or does.
Even the CEO and founder of rival theater chain Alamo Drafthouse jumped into the fray. Tim League ripped Aron in an open letter not just for an idea he said "could seriously hurt our industry" but Aron's "generalization of millennial behavior," seeing as how heavy mobile phone use "isn't just a millennial behavior, it is a global attention span epidemic."
So there.
Coincidentally, this texting dust-up momentarily eclipsed another big controversy roiling the movie industry, the possibility that movies may be available at a premium price for home viewing on the same day they're released in theaters.
While some strongly object, saying it will negatively affect the way films are consumed, others contend it is merely a matter of giving people options they want, and inevitable.
Both sides may be saying the same thing, it's just a question of their version of "foreseeable future."
Sometimes the "foreseeable future" is spot-on, as when then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in a 1961 Voice of America interview that "in the foreseeable future, a Negro can achieve the same position my brother has." The brother he meant was President John F. Kennedy, and assuming the "foreseeable future" extended half a century, he was right.
Often, however, "foreseeable future" suggests a lack of foresight, a surfeit of optimism or pessimism. It also can be something of a dodge.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, at a 2011 Chicago appearance, answered speculation that he was looking to leave his post: "I'm going to be doing this for the foreseeable future."
Geithner's resignation came a year and a half later.
Vladimir Stadnyk, Standard & Poor's lead municipal credit analyst of Chicago finances, observed upon upping the city's debt rating in 1987: "We feel comfortable they will have prudent fiscal operations for the foreseeable future. We got the impression that everything was in control and they were allowed to do their business as they should."
Doing business in the fashion Chicago did has made it tough for it to do business today.
A 2010 report said "Tangled" would be "the last fairy tale produced by Disney's animation group for the foreseeable future." The blockbuster "Frozen" came out in 2013.
Warren Buffett, in his 1980 letter to Berkshire Hathaway investors, expressed reservations about the reinsurance business as being too risky.
"The magnetic lure of such cash-generating characteristics, currently enhanced by the presence of high interest rates, is transforming the reinsurance market into 'amateur night,'" Buffett wrote, promising to "retain an active reinsurance presence but, for the foreseeable future, we expect no premium growth from this activity."
Ajit Jain joined Berkshire Hathaway in 1982. Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group, the separate underwriting unit he built, is among the company's largest operations, and he is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Buffett as CEO.
Aron has only been at AMC a few months. He previously headed Starwood Hotels and Resorts, pro basketball's Philadelphia 76ers, Vail Resorts and Norwegian Cruise Line. He's no dummy, just unaware of the trap he walked into.
Someone less focused on his crystal ball and more on the recent past might have recalled a similar discussion just four years ago.
Regal Entertainment CEO Amy Miles said her chain might experiment with relaxing its mobile phone prohibitions to appeal to younger consumers "if we had a movie that appealed to a younger demographic (so) we could test some of these concepts," an idea Deadline reported Imax's Greg Foster seemed to support.
Alamo Drafthouse's League, then as now, expressed utter revulsion. Public sentiment backed him, so everyone backed off.
"You can only be immersed in a story if you are focused on it," League wrote in his latest letter. "If while watching a film you are intermittently checking your email, posting on social media, chatting with friends, etc., there is no way you are fully engaged in the story on screen. I find that to be disrespectful to the creators, those who make the very existence of cinema possible."
Creators make cinema possible, but audiences sustain it, and they'll get what they want … for the foreseeable future.
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
References
- ^ philrosenthal@tribpub.com (www.chicagotribune.com)
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