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Less than a day after AMC Entertainment’s new CEO suggested the company may be willing to make selected theaters “texting friendly,” the company received massive backlash. The move ostensibly was meant to entice Millennials to start coming back to the movies.
Silver screen attendance among this age group has fallen sharply in recent years. Between the selections available to stream online and the short wait times between “in theater” and “available to stream,” many millions of younger Americans opt to either wait or skip the movie experience altogether.
Someone convinced CEO Adam Aron it would instead be a marvelous idea to open some theaters to texting throughout the movie experience.
In speaking to Variety magazine, Aron said: “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cell phone. That’s not how they live their life.”
Maybe so, but judging from the “feedback” Aron’s statement generated, he may want to rethink that concept.
The idea started innocently enough, with attempts to find a well-intentioned compromise between folks who just want to watch the movie and Millennials who, AMC thinks, can’t manage to put their phones down for a couple of hours. The idea floated would be designated auditoriums where people who wanted to text could do so without impediment, right through the movie.
Speaking through Twitter, the company said: “If ever, we only would pursue (allowing texting) in a way that we can totally be confident all our guests will fully enjoy the movie-going experience at AMC.”
It looked like AMC realized their mistake and tried to walk it back, but movie buffs read between the lines and responded in kind, inundating AMC’s social media accounts with raving objections and various threats should the decision be implemented. Complaints included typical rants about a “distracted, self-entitled generation,” but carried the sting of threats to go to competitive theaters, threats the company can’t take likely.
In response, AMC walked back even further, blaming “press reports” for leaking the information and saying it would be only in limited locations, if at all. That didn’t help, so the company went further, tweeting: “We know the vast majority of our audience wants no texting …”
Detractors and angry moviegoers didn’t relent, so AMC’s spokesman Ryan Noonan released a statement to the media: “Given that so many of today’s moviegoers are passionate about preserving the purity of watching movies undisturbed in our theatres, there is no specific timeframe as to when we might introduce such a test, if ever … the overwhelming majority of our current audience does not want texting to disrupt their experience.”
Maybe they listened after all.
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Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, a leading NY PR firm. Follow 5WPR on Instagram.
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