The Josh Innes Show - The Beauty Of The Cinematic Experience

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

AMC is going to be running more commercials prior to movies at the theater. Why is this an issue? Everything in this country has an advertisement attached to it...why should the movies be any different? It's odd to me when people cry about these things. What are things we wax poetic about but really don't care about? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, let's see here. The headline reads, Brace yourself for more ads before movies at AMC theaters, reports say. Moviegoers, brace yourselves. The dreaded advertisements before a movie are expected to get longer at AMC cinemas, according to multiple reports. The cinema chain is joining major competitors and running even more commercials starting in July under a new partnership with cinema advertising company National Cinemedia. Multiple outlets including Bloomberg and New York Times have reported the news. The move comes in an effort to increase revenue without raising ticket prices as cinemas continue to struggle financially and recover from COVID-19 losses the Hollywood Reporter has reported. Let's see what this means. Like that's an interesting question. Like does this mean

more? Obviously doesn't mean more trailers. It means commercials. That doesn't really bother me because hasn't our expectation forever been that you go to the movies and you see a bunch of coming attractions and commercials? Is there really a huge difference between the commercials and the coming attractions? Honestly, I think I'd rather see commercials than coming attractions because at least the trailers or the trailers are going to sit there and tell us everything we're going to see

in whatever movie they show. I try to zone out the trailers as we've discussed before. I try to zone that out because I don't want to see every single thing about the movie that I'd like to see. Like I'll see a like I can tell if I want to see a movie in 10 seconds, right? Like I don't need like if I see, okay, here's someone I like and the plot seems fun, I'll watch it. I don't need to see everything about it. I always go back to the one that was like the trailer that gave away

the most that I had ever seen was a movie called Good Boys, and it was a movie that was supposed to be like tween super bad. And I'm like, this this is great Seth Rogen's involved in it. It's going to be like super bad for like 12 year olds. This is great. This is funny. I'm in like that's all you have to tell me Seth Rogen produced super bad movie 12 year old boys. I go see it instead. I saw the trailer every time I went to the movies and every single

thing that was funny in the movie was in the trailer. There was not one thing in that trailer or in the movie that wasn't in the trailer. There was nothing that surprised me. Like, I hate when you've seen a trailer so many times that you go to the movie just waiting to see those parts of the movie. You're like, well, this feels like that scene's about to come up right here. That sucks. Nobody likes that. That's no good. So I'd actually rather than if you're going to give me 10 minutes of coming attractions or 10 minutes of commercials, like just give me like give me 10 minutes of commercials. Give me some Verizon ads. Give me some fucking McDonald's ads. I would take that over scene two and a half, three minutes describing an entire movie and giving me all the funny parts all the scary parts

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Limited time offer. Terms at pick6.draftkings.com slash promos. There was that movie, what was it called? The one where the chick's on the date with the guy and like she's doing the the like the air drops or whatever and she's got to you know try to save her kid who's back at home and like this guy is air dropping shit about how he's in the house. Like all you would need to do is tell me that. All you need to do is tell me kids are back at the home with the babysitter, some guy broke into the house, he's air dropping the woman the videos of him in the house, but she can't tell the guy she's with.

That's all I need. The problem is they'll do these rapid fire shots and you'll see like someone falling out of a window. So you're like, well shit, I know at some point this woman's gonna fucking fall out of this window. Like, why would you do that? Why would that be your idea of a good idea in a trailer? When you produce these things, I don't need three minutes of that shit. I don't need you to show me every cool fucking thing that happens in the movie. But that's what trailers do. So really, like when you go to the movies, you anticipate spending 10 minutes before the movie watching something that's not the movie, right? Or a lot of times they'll run commercials, well, prior to the trailers as well. Like it's not like they weave them in and out. It's not like they go trailer, commercial, trailer, commercial. Like I have no issue with

this. Like I don't know why people would have an issue with it, but let's see what the details are. no issue with this. Like I don't know why people would have an issue with it. But let's see what the details are. Under the deal AMC will play commercials in what is known as the Platinum Spot, the part right before the movie begins, in complete contrast to this 2019 decision in which it had shunned NCM's proposal to place ads in that spot. National Cinema Media has gone on to sign agreements with two of AMC's rivals, Regal and Cinemark, that year according to NYT. Like, I'm okay with this. This kind of shit doesn't bother me. We're in the era of team endorsement patches on jerseys. You know, like, soccer teams barely even have names anymore. They're just a sponsor, right? Like, who gives a shit? Like, usually, like, back in my day when I'd go see movies, you'd get, you know,

speaking of, so I saw a reel the other day that showed the old intro to the Regal Cinema where like you're almost like on this roller coaster and like welcome to the Regal Cinema and like you go like up and down and sell the shit and then this big popcorn pops right in your face right before the end. Fuck that takes me back to my childhood. I don't know if anybody remembers this. Probably not because I don't know if you had any Cinemark theaters where you were. But in Baton Rouge we had Tinseltown which was owned by Cinemark. It has since been torn down.

I think somebody was murdered in the parking lot of Tinseltown. And I'm fairly certain someone threatened to murder me in the bathroom at Tinseltown. It was the weirdest experience I've ever had at the movies. I'm taking a leak at a urinal and some guy just walks behind me and kind of whispers, I'm going to kill you and then goes into the fucking stall and I'm like, well, I'm zipping up and heading on out and I don't think I'm making this up. I'm pretty positive this happened. It was a weird thing, but Tinseltown in Baton Rouge, which has now been torn down and in its place in that same area they have now built a Topgolf, Tinseltown was kind of like for a while the trendy theater to go to.

Didn't mean it was the best theater, but it had that kind of, you know, that tacky quality about it where they made everything like the black and white checkered floors and the neon. Tinseltown USA, right? And before movies would show at Tinseltown, they had this fucking cat that would come up on the screen and sing songs. And like I can remember the song, like the cat's dancing around and he's like, hey, let's party, let's rock. We got tickets to Cinemark. Doobie doobie doobie doobie at the Cinemark. And he's like, He's almost like that cat that Paul Abdul danced with in the music video, you know, the opposites attract one. But and like that was cool. Like you'd see some trailers. You'd see that. That's it. I go to the Marcus cinemas here, which used to be the Werenberg cinemas in Saint Louis.

Werenberg cinemas had this legendary jingle that would play right before the movie started and there'd be just black and you'd hear the Werenberg, Werenberg theater. And those were all bought out by this guy named Marcus, his family. And now he comes up on the screen right before the movie starts and explains to you about buying popcorn and shit. Seems like a pleasant enough guy. But like I don't really care, like it doesn't bother me that commercials air at the movies. Because you know when you sit in there, you're kind of at their mercy anyway.

It's not like you're at home. It's not like you're being violated by these things. You just sit there and you watch them. So if they want to air a commercial right before the movie starts, I'd argue that it's pretty fucking shocking that it's taken them this long to do it. Like you wonder why, like you're already at the movies and you're already at the AMC or the Regal or wherever you are, why the hell do you need like a giant

production to show you that you're seeing a movie at Regal Cinema? Why not just air a commercial right there? Like that doesn't bother me. I'm fine. Air as many commercials as you want. If you're making money and you're keeping the cinema open, rock on, man. Like I don't want the movie theaters to ever go away. You know, I'm a movie theater guy, right? Like I think about sports all the time, right? Like in going to sporting events, I could sit my ass at home and I feel like I'm not missing much not going to a sporting event. Like this afternoon I could have gone to the Cardinals game. I think they play it like 1-15 today at

home and they've lost the last two games in really odd fashion. I decided I didn't want to go but I could but I'd actually rather not invest the time in having to drive, take the train, go spend money on tickets, spend money on beer. Like I can get the same experience sitting at home watching a 65 inch TV watching a baseball game. I can get everything kind of up close and I can see everything and I'll be fine with it. The movies you cannot recreate that same feeling at home. You cannot

recreate the feeling of going to the cinema and spending way too much on popcorn, spending way too much on a Soty Pop, sneaking in some candy because you look you're already going to give them stupid money on popcorn and Soty Pop anyway. You're going to sneak in your M&Ms and your Goobers and shit and you're going to sneak that in there, but you can't replace that. And I hope cinemas never go away. Like some things you look back on and you think you're going to miss them and then you don't really miss them. Like we like to wax poetic about Blockbuster and a Friday night dad takes you to Blockbuster. You got your Blockbuster card and you spend half an hour trying to find something to watch. Some Fridays

you know exactly what you want because there's a new movie out and you've got to rent it and Blockbuster's got 75 copies on the wall and you're hoping there's at least one there that you can rent but some nights you don't even know what you want to rent you're just going to go in and probably rent the same shit you've seen a hundred times like here's fucking rocky three i don't own rocky three but i'm going to rent rocky three i'm going to rent uh rent dream warriors or i'm going to rent whatever and that's just kind of what you're going to go with. You know like that was the fun and we wax poetic about that but as we sit here in 2025, I

don't believe that there's a human listening to this podcast right now that goes, you know, I'd much rather have to get up get in the car drive to Blockbuster deal with lines and everything at Blockbuster to rent a tape that I have to bring back in 2 days or 3 days, I'd rather do that over sitting at home going to Amazon and buying a movie for three dollars and sitting on my ass. Nobody would take that. Nobody wants to get up and drive to Redbox. It amazes me when I still see a Redbox and I'm like, who the fuck wants to use a Redbox? There are certain things that we wax poetic about, but deep down

we don't really want them. I do that with cassette tapes. I used to love audio cassette tapes because I would record all of my shows on them. I would record baseball games on them, and I would drive around in my car and I would listen to them, and I would listen to see how I sounded, and I would rewind, and if the tape came unspooled, I'd get out a pencil or my pinky finger and respool the son of a bitch. Like, I mean, you wax poetic about that. And you're like, I really wish I had a cassette deck and could listen to tapes, right? But then you're like, it's a lot easier just to use my phone and say,

hey, I want to hear Air Supply today instead of looking for an Air Supply tape, putting it in, rewinding it, just playing it on your iTunes, right? So like we wax poetic about a lot of shit. And we don't really mean it when we wax poetic, we're just kind of, you know, old manning it. But as far as the movies go, seeing a movie in the cinema, I wax poetic about that. And I mean it when I wax poetic about it, because I just love the movie theater and you can't replace going to the theater,

particularly when you have that moment when you're in the right crowd, big crowd of people, funny movie and everybody's laughing their asses off. Or like when I saw Final Destination and that the first Final Destination when Homeboy gets hit by the bus and everybody's like, oh my God, like you can't replace that at home. It doesn't work that way. Or in Signs, whenever the kids are watching the birthday party video, and they're watching the birthday party video and the

alien just pops up on the screen for like two seconds and you're like, holy shit! Like it's that kind of thing and you can't really recreate that. It's impossible to do that at home. Certain things just aren't going to work that way. And the movie is like that. Like seeing certain movies. Like how do you sit at home and go, I'm just going to watch Mission Impossible at home. Like how do you do that? Like it has to be seen on a giant screen. So if to survive and to thrive and to keep movie theaters alive, it means there are a couple fucking commercials on the before the movie. Fine. I don't know why that would bother anybody anybody like, oh, you've soiled the sanctity of the cinema experience. Well, bullshit.

I mean, there is no sanctity of anything anymore. I mean, again, the New York Yankees have an advertising patch on their uniform. The St. Louis Cardinals, some of the most iconic uniforms ever. The Dodgers. Dodgers, hockey uniforms like the Montreal Canadiens and like legendary the Toronto Maple Leafs, just the Blackhawks, legendary sports jerseys that have been around forever and are associated with greatness and excellence have advertisements on them. Like I saw somebody whining about the number of advertisements that are on the ring in WWE now and I saw where I forgot who it was that said this, but said that Vince McMahon would have never allowed advertisements on the ring in wrestling

because the ring was sacred. I'm like, brother, nothing's sacred. You took away WrestleMania from New Orleans because you can make a couple extra bucks in Las Vegas this after you announced it was going to be in New Orleans. There's no such thing as sanctity. There's no such thing as sacred. Like, bullshit. If you can make an extra buck, you make an extra buck, right? No one's watching wrestling and going, you know, I'm probably have to turn this shit off because wrestling is totally sold out and they've got advertisements on the ring mat now like bullshit. Nobody cares. Nobody cared that Macho Man Randy Savage was doing slim gym commercials forever and everything's

an advertisement. But I saw somebody bitching. Some media guy was like, there is nothing that WWE won't put an advertisement on. Yeah, that's how it fucking works. These things have to make money for them to survive. And I think sometimes people fail to understand that, that not everything's a charity. Not everything is like that. It's not a 401C or whatever a charity is.

You're not a church or something like that, you know? You're not an animal shelter. It's a business and you have to find ways to make business. So sometimes you have to deal with Josh putting spots in the middle of a podcast. It happens if you want the things you like to survive. Does that suck in some cases? Sure. Do you think I want to stop? Do you think I feel good about having to stop this thing down every episode of this and air some commercials? No, I prefer not to and for a long time I didn't. But I can make a couple extra bucks and survive doing it. So I do. It's just the way it works, man.

That's life and that's what life is in 2025 as people try to find a especially in heritage media or old school things like movie theaters and stuff like that are finding ways that they have to survive and thrive. So who gives a shit if a commercial airs in a movie? I would take 10 McDonald's commercials over a four-minute trailer that tells me the whole fucking movie. Like I want to see the Paul Rudd movie with the neighbor and all I needed to see was 10 seconds of like the guy like

Paul Rudd and the guy like turns on him or whatever. That's all I need to see and I'm in. Nobody needs to see four minutes of the entire movie. So give me all the T-Mobile spots you want. Just stop spoiling movies with the long trailers. Thank you.