AMC CEO Adam Aron on this afternoon’s Q2 earnings call verified what we first reported: The No. 1 circuit has plans to cut down its pre-show.
Back in July, in a deal with NCM, AMC added more ad time in an effort to earn more bucks. Studio executives raised their pitchforks in anger, especially after AMC made it known to consumers in advance that there’s 25-30 minutes of pre-show.
AMC plans to shorten the pre-show doesn’t mean they’re cutting the new ad window out; that agreement having just commenced with NCM.
Said Aron about the future pre-show plan, “We think we can shave four or five minutes out of it. So it’s not that there’s been a change of heart. We’ve always knew that when we did the NCM deal, that we would probably have to shorten at the same time we’re lengthening, so that those two changes to vectors offset each other and balance each other out.”
How is that four-to-five minute edit of the pre-show comprised? Aron said that in their own internal pre-show study which also included rival circuits, they noticed that AMC ran one extra trailer next to the competition. That’s at least 2 1/2 minutes right there that can be cut per Aron. There’s also another 2-3 minutes of AMC’s own internal promos (i.e. “Silence Your Cellphones” and “Silence Is Golden”), that’s also up for being edited out of the pre-show as well a one-minute promotional piece from Imax.
“Some consumers love the trailer packages because they get to see what’s coming, and we know our studio partners love the trailer packages because the best form of advertising that they’ll find anywhere is putting their movie product right in front of faces. But we also know that some of our other consumers think the package has gone too long, and we’re trying to find a happy medium,” said Aron.
