5 Gimmicks That Will Soon Make Movie Theaters a Living Hell

The concept is called second-screen viewing. Smartphone apps like Shazam and SoundHound, which formerly were used for figuring out whether that song is Foghat or Papa Roach, have partnered with cinema ad networks so that their audio-recognition technology can be used to access additional promotional material on your phone while the preshow ads are playing on the big screen. So, we should keep our phones turned on to ... enhance the commercials? They've just combined the worst of both worlds.

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You'll take selfies for prizes during the "turn off your cell" announcement.

If you were hoping this bullshit ended after the trailers, it's our sad duty to inform you that they're not going to stop there. As if being trapped in a darkened space with dozens of shouting, pooping toddlers wasn't exasperating enough, they've already conducted second-screen viewings of The Little Mermaid and other Disney films, in which they encourage audiences to bring an iPad along to access extra interactive features during the movie. Now, doing this sort of thing at kids' movies is one thing, but seeing as advertising executives aren't always known for their restraint, does anyone honestly believe they won't gradually try to trickle it into everything?

chat9780/iStock/Getty Images, Halfbrick Studios
Oh, look: it turns out the murderer was a fruit ninja.

"Imagine a wonderland of sights and sounds from the moment you walk through the door of your local multiplex, where everything around you is a modern expression of storytelling."

Odd that they don't mention that half of what you see has something to do with the concession counter.

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Come for the grand mal seizures, stay for the diabetic comas.

The makers claim this onslaught of brightly flashing obnoxiousness is intended to hark back to the days of old Hollywood, when going to the movies was an exciting event worthy of ... well, an aggressively colorful artillery barrage in the middle of a lightning storm that rains candy, apparently. Regarding this clusterfuck, Jim Molony, director of business operations, says, "We want to create a story in the lobby." Presumably it's a story that can be told only through the language of uncontrollable vomiting.

The technology they've developed allows the audience to control what's happening onscreen by way of motion- and sound-sensing cameras. One might suppose something like this, which is essentially a larger-scale version of what you can do at home with your game console, might be worth a five-minute laugh at a theme park or something. But of course that's not what they want to use it for. Its intended use is for ad campaigns shown during movie previews, such as in the AquaDuck game, where your arm-flailing helps to send Donald Duck barreling down a waterslide in an advertisement for Disney Cruise Line.

Audience Entertainment
Not even everyone in the paid promo video can be assed to play along.

And hey, look! They've partnered with our friends from Barco, the company from the previous entry that thinks theater lobbies should look like you're having a peyote nightmare while trapped inside an electronics store. The product they came up with is called iD (short for "Interactive Dimension") and is being billed as a way to "create a new cinema environment allowing moviegoers to physically connect and control the screen's content the moment they take their seat," according to the press release. Essentially, this appears to mean doing the wave in time with onscreen prompts, in a manner so obvious and simplistic that a sign-language-trained gorilla would find it condescending.

Theaters in China have started introducing something called danmu, which loosely translates to "bullet screens," whereupon movie patrons can post their comments via cellphone right up on the big screen for everyone to see. Actually, you can't help seeing it, since apparently the entire movie sometimes gets overrun by a Matrix-style swarm of text, all presumably spelling out whatever the Chinese equivalents are for "LOL," "YOLO," and "THIS MOVIE IS TOTES TEH GHEY SUXXORZ."

via news.com.au
We're pretty sure what we're looking at is the word "amazeballs," written out about 60 times.

We suppose this kind of thing could be fun in theory, if you were able to somehow pack the crowd with enough witty people who could turn the experience into an approximation of MST3K. But, realistically, the chances of that kind of random karmic confluence actually ever coming to pass are slim in the extreme. What you're more likely to wind up with is the world's first live-action theatrical reenactment of the birth of an average YouTube comments section.

via TheNanfang.com
China's laws against political debate don't sound so bad now, do they?

First, a mechanism jerks your seat around like a bully in a middle school cafeteria.

LA Live Insider
For each showing, they put Dramamine on the seat like a hotel pillow mint.

Then, undeterred by the colossal failure of all previous attempts to augment the movie-going experience via the magic of stink, they've included their own version of Smell-O-Vision. And for those people who've always wished that the row they're sitting in could be more like a high school dance/dank graveyard/Liberace concert (complete with all the sticky residue that all those things entail), there are built-in options to produce bubbles, fog, wind, rain, vibrators, and tickle monsters.

LA Live Insider
This was designed for either porn or the Captain Planet movie.

But wait a minute. The promo promised to stimulate all five senses! So how will our taste buds get involved in "the paradigm"? We hate to even contemplate how these seats will be addressing that issue, but maybe they're referring to the panicky, dry-mouthed sensation theater owners will get after forking over up to $2 million per venue to install them.

For more poor cinematic gimmicks, check out If Classic Movies Used Viral Marketing.