Leave the Movie Previews Alone

A half-hour of previews and a commute ballooned the last movie I saw in a theater — the cozy two-hour-and-12-minute Nosferatu — well past a three-hour time commitment. The standard trailers, the Noovie trivia crap, and, more recently, product ads (Pepsi? Honda?? Chick-fil-A???) that now run before feature presentations all feel longer, louder, and more annoying than ever before. It’s gotten so bad that last month, a Connecticut state senator introduced a bill that would require theaters to disclose exactly how long the previews are, empowering moviegoers to more easily avoid them entirely. “If they want to get there early and watch the promos, they can,” State Senator Martin Looney told the state’s regional paper, the Register Citizen. “But if they just want to see the feature, they ought to be able to get there just in time for that.”