Phone-Friendly Cinemas Might Soon Be A Thing, ‘Cos Humanity Is Cooked

Today in Proof Humanity Does Not Deserve Nice Things, US cinema chain AMC is honest-to-God contemplating letting people use their phones to text, Tweet, or otherwise search for spoilers while watching a bloody film. 

Not only does this concept unwind a solid 70 years of cinematic etiquette, it’s also evidence our focus is so easily stolen, we need entertainment to distract us from our entertainment.

 
The justification behind this madness, of course, is that cinemas need to find news ways to reach us youth. CEO Adam Aron told Variety “we need to reshape our product in some concrete ways so that millennials go to movie theaters with the same degree of intensity as baby boomers.”

He thinks one way of doing that is by allowing us unbroken contact with the outside world, which is kind of antithetical to the whole cinema concept as we know it. 
Aron says “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.

“You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.”
Aron suggested one way of doing that without disturbing the rest of the movie-going populace is by quarantining the unwashed heathens to their own cages adopting more text-friendly auditoriums. 
Of course, those ideas haven’t yet been applied to the nation’s second – soon to be first – largest cinema change, but they are indicative of an industry that’s still quickly losing ground to streaming services and video games. At least it’s socially acceptable to dick around on your phone there, right?
Source: BBC / Variety. 

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