We went to go see The Hobbit at Celebration Cinema at Crossroads Mall in Portage Michigan. The movie itself was okay, it suffered from some pacing problems I thought and it was rather long-in-the-tooth for overall playtime however it’s a big story so you almost have to endure it, along with what appears to be two other movies. When it’s done it’s going to be a six movie epic, much like Star Wars.

When we walked into the theater we noticed several seats that were marked “Reserved for DBOX Customers” and so we simply avoided them and sat elsewhere. This cinema has stadium seating so you could really sit anywhere, except right up in front, and have an enjoyable experience.

The movie started, everything was going according to plan, trailers, opening credits, then the movie itself. Nothing exciting or untoward until the first battle scene. The loud noise from the speaker system was joined with a tactile vibration and a rather annoying single-note throbbing sound. Turns out, it was these DBOX seats. Someone apparently paid for one of them to be activated and it was making a hell of a racket. It was so unsettling and disturbing that it almost ruined the movie for me, except that the movie kind of ruined itself, sort of. It was unpleasant, to say the least.

This DBOX thing is the latest cash grab from movie theaters trying to make a buck. They screw you for concessions (there are two definitions for concession, yah) and then there are all the other little add-on bits, like the difference between primetime and matinée prices, which I will admit has been around for quite a while, but it’s still a cash grab, all the way to the most recent worthless misadventures in cinema:

– IMAX and IMAX 3D
– 42 FPS Projection
– Real3D
– DBOX “Feel Around” Seats

Each of these things is fluff. The 3D doesn’t really add anything more than eyestrain and cluster headaches, IMAX is just a double-sized screen and new projectors, the 42FPS schlock that Peter Jackson is trying to hawk is just as useless. One thing I will give 42FPS, when Peter Jackson uses quick-cut-scenes in his dialogue pieces in his movies, you can feel the crisp tight jarring all the more than you could with lower-FPS presented movies. The latest bit of movie-time bullshit is this DBOX crap. Seats and shake and throb, little more than magic fingers for movie seats. It’s the collision of sex toys and movie making that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime. It’s loud, it’s distracting, and it damages whatever movie it’s paired with.

I left the theater glad I only spent $10 bucks for two people, but bent that I had to endure exposure to this cash-grab DBOX bullshit.

What’s the answer? Now that movies take only one to two months to come out on BluRay or DVD, there is something to be said about just waiting around for them to hit Netflix, RedBox, or hell, even a video rental shop and just popping it in at home.

The only reason to go out to the movies is to actually GO. It’s a special space, it’s dark, lots of strangers, there’s a spectacle and you might just lose yourself in what you’re watching. Now, with all this assorted bullshit surrounding the experience you want, making it worse I would argue, it ruins the “going out to the movies” specialness. Not only is it distracting and unnecessary but the collateral damage from some of these fluff bits (like DBOX) just ruins it for everyone, and it adds more price and distance between the movie-going-public and these cinemas. For an IMAX 3D movie, with DBOX seats, with 42FPS projection, a soda, popcorn, perhaps a box of candy for two, you are starting to breach the $100 mark of obnoxiousness.

So what’s going to happen? Cinemas will add more bullshit and the public will eventually erode away. It’s like trying to grab a handful of sand, the harder you squeeze, the faster the sand runs out of your clenched hands. They will have priced themselves out of business with all this extra fluff bullshit. Then, because nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum, there will be new movie theaters without concessions, with a shoestring staff and plain projectors and people will flock to them because that’s what they are after. Not the fluff, but the movie. If things go from bad to worse for the economy, this could be the exact thing that kills the cinema for good. Movie makers will just switch to the “Direct to BluRay” channel and skip theatrical releases altogether.