What’s Wrong with this Picture?

It’s not my imagination. Movie previews are starting to become bigger than the movies themselves.

That became crystal clear during the holiday weekend when I finally decide to carve out some time to take the two smaller Finnells to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

We scramble to get to the theater in plenty of time - even though we know that the 1:05 p.m. showing of Harry Pottery is more likely to start at about 1:20 or 1:25. We just don’t want to miss those glorious previews.

And glorious they are.

The preview of Avatar seems to be shown in real time... like a full 3-minute segment of the movie, instead of a series of excerpts. There’s a funny clip of Despicable Me — again showing a full excerpt of the animated movie. Those are accompanied by previews of New Moon, 2010 and about three or four other promising films.

By the time the “real” movie starts up, my son turns to me and asks, “What movie are we seeing again?” I give him a funny look and don’t answer, because I assume he’s just joking.

Then I realize he’s not alone.

A boy sitting directly in front of us turns to the woman sitting next to him and asks the same question: “What movie are we seeing?”

Just then my son shoots me a look that says, See, I’m not the only one!

To cap off all the madness, a little girl sitting on the woman’s right starts whining, “I’m ready to go home!”

The girl, who seemed to be about 5 or 6 years old, obviously thought she already had had enough entertainment for the day after sitting through all those previews.

After a couple of minutes of more whining, I turn around to see if I can find another set of seats, because I know it’s going to be a long afternoon. Really long. The girl has no idea that the movie we’re about to see has a running time of 2 ½ hours — 153 minutes to be exact.

It could get really ugly.

But who can blame her? I could have walked out at that point, feeling pretty satisfied that I had gotten at least one or two bucks worth of entertainment value.

I’m not complaining. I like previews. They’re like tasty appetizers. But I’m starting to worry that previews are heading in the direction of movies. At one time, you could expect a movie to wrap up in 1 ½ hours unless it was a major epic like Gandhi, Titanic or The Lord of the Rings. Movies more than two hours in length are now becoming the norm.

When NBC aired a 7 1/2-minute long preview of Spiderman 3 a couple of years ago, it seemed to be a foreshadowing of things to come. You know some production company is just itching to top that.

Oh... my verdict of the movie Half Blood Prince? Mildly scary.
Long previews? Really, really scary.

Too long? Just right? Or a necessary evil to keep you coming back to the theater? What are your thoughts about movie previews?

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by Shari Scales Finnell