AMC Movie Theater CEO Adam Aron is considering letting people use their phones during movies because why the hell not? The world is already ruined by entitled brats who can’t be controlled. “When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off their phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear ‘please cut off your left arm above the elbow,'” Aron tells Variety. “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.”
The movie chain has been trying to update their theaters by recreating a home-like experience for its patrons. To that end, they’ve already replaced every old seat in their auditoriums with recliners. Allowing people to text and talon their phones, the thinking goes, would just add to the home-like experience. Never mind the fact that when you’re at home you are just bothering one or two other people, as opposed to hundreds who have paid good money not to be distracted by the light of your phone and your incessant tappity-tap-tapping.
From Engadget:
Movie theaters and places of worship are a few of the remaining places where using a cellphone is verboten, and by pandering to this demographic’s horrible habit AMC is stripping away common courtesy and setting a gross precedent in the name of profits.
Aron says that certain sections where texting would be allowed is one possibility for this, while the more likely situation would be having specific auditoriums set up to be “more texting friendly.” If the chain is willing to kick out someone wearing Google Glass for fear of piracy, though, how is it going to differentiate someone texting from a person recording what’s on the screen with their phone?
How indeed? What do you think? Great idea or the second horseman of the coming apocalypse?