Are you the kind of person who just loves it when distracting cellphone screens light up around you at the movie theater? Well you, terrible person, are in for a treat thanks to a new move that may see texting coming to a theater near you.
In an interview with Variety, AMC's freshly-minted CEO Adam Aron—head of the world's largest theater chain—said that he was open to allowing patrons to text and fiddle around on their smartphones in some of the company's theaters. The move, Aron says, will attract younger Millennial consumers who apparently don't go to the movies because the stupid grown-ups don't let them look at their phones.
"Yes. When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow," he said in the interview. "You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cell phone. That’s not how they live their life."
That's a pretty crass generalization of Millennials, and ignores the fact that a cellphone-friendly movie theater sounds about as appealing as heroin-friendly nightclub.
Aron said that his plan wouldn't allow texting in all of AMC's movie theaters, but rather in specific designated auditoriums (which would be the ones pretty much everyone would avoid at all costs). Aside from pissing off patrons who came to the movies to, you know, watch a movie, permitting cell phone use during a screening could open up a whole big film pirating can of worms.
If the future of movie theaters involves teenagers Snapchatting their favorite scenes with one of those godforsaken (but admittedly adorable) filters, then I don't want to be a part of it. At that point, we'd lose the most magical part of going to the cinema: a two-hour escape from the outside world.