Should people be able to use their phones after the lights go down in movie theaters?
Hollywood has pondered that question for years as a way to make moviegoing more appealing to teenagers and young adults. Because cinephiles have always responded with venom, to put it mildly, the answer has always been an emphatic “no.”
But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Despite recent successes like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners,” the North American box office is down 33 percent from 2019 — just before the pandemic sped up a consumer shift to streaming — according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.
So on Wednesday, Blumhouse, the horror studio affiliated with Universal Pictures, teamed with Meta to experiment with a technology called Movie Mate. It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one. Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way “to get audiences back in theaters.”
Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules, according to data from the National Research Group, a film industry consultancy. Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?
As far as product rollouts go, this was a muted one: Blumhouse and Universal made Movie Mate available for only one night and only during screenings of an old movie, “M3GAN,” about artificial intelligence run amok. (Traditionalists, insert your own joke here.) The rerelease was part of a Blumhouse fan event called Halfway to Halloween.
About 70 people attended a showing at the AMC theater at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, not counting a couple of dozen Meta and Blumhouse employees. “I know this sounds weird, but please take out your phones,” a bubbly Blumhouse representative told the crowd before the movie started.
“I see that some of you are just staring at me,” she said. “We actually want you to take out your phones.” Instructions were given for how to activate Movie Mate, and the lights went down, revealing an auditorium filled with glowing devices.
“Oh, wow, this is really cool,” Flannery Johnston, 28, said as the chatbot came to life, offering a personalized hello from M3GAN, the diabolical A.I. doll at the center of the movie. Over the next 20 minutes, the chatbot served up about 10 messages. One was a question: “Do you think they’re inventing other dolls like me?” An affirmative reply prompted the response, “Don’t be delulu.”
Ms. Johnston’s interest quickly faded, however.
“I started to feel uncomfortable looking at my phone — I didn’t want to be obnoxious — and basically just waited until after the movie was over to read through all the messages,” she said as the credits rolled. (A critic for the Hollywood trade publication Variety had a similar reaction, calling Movie Mate little more than a marketing gimmick.)
Blumhouse deemed the experiment worthwhile. “The enthusiasm we saw from fans — especially younger ones — shows there’s real interest in finding ways to enhance, not replace, the fun of going to the movies,” Karen Barragan, a spokeswoman for the studio, said in an email on Thursday.
As for the criticisms? “Not everything is going to be for everybody,” she said.
Movie Mate is part of a grand plan by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, to spread chatbots across all of his apps and other parts of the internet. In Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision of the future, artificially intelligent chatbots will be open to having fun, personalized conversations anywhere at anytime, apparently even inside movie theaters. Meta declined an interview request.
Not everyone in the movie business is jumping at the opportunity. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a boutique theater chain that caters to film buffs, refused to participate in the Movie Mate rollout, as did a smattering of other theaters across the country. (An Alamo spokesman declined to comment.) But the two biggest multiplex operators, AMC Entertainment and Regal Cineworld, decided to give it a shot, with the stipulation that ticket buyers had to be clearly informed ahead of time about what to expect.
“How our guests interact with content outside our theaters is changing, and if we have a studio partner that wants to try new things we are open to supporting those initiatives,” Adam Rymer, Regal Cineworld’s chief commercial officer for the United States, said in an email. AMC declined to comment.
To some degree, young moviegoers are forcing their hands.
“A Minecraft Movie” (Warner Bros.) became a runaway hit last month after young attendees flouted theater rules about noise and phone use. They threw popcorn, sat on one another’s shoulders and shouted “chicken jockey,” a line in the film, all while recording their antics and posting the videos on TikTok and other social media sites.
Last year, “Wicked” (Universal) became a box office smash ($754 million) in part because of a similar dynamic, with fans bursting into song during showings and sharing videos online. In 2023, the romantic comedy “Anyone but You” (Sony) took in a surprisingly strong $220 million after people started to make TikTok videos of themselves interacting with the ending.
Abhijay Prakash, Blumhouse’s president, said Movie Mate could help “eventize” film releases, creating a fear-of-missing-out urgency among young ticket buyers. “It’s not us saying, ‘Come to a movie theater and randomly be on your phone,’” he said. “It’s about enriching the experience. Younger audiences love to interact with their entertainment.”
Blumhouse and Universal, however, have no plans to offer Movie Mate at screenings of new movies, including “M3GAN 2.0,” which arrives in theaters on June 27.
Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
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