I have to get a giant cherry coke and see if I have the fortitude of bladder to make it through the movie.
This is part of the reason I really like theaters. I struggle to force myself to pay attention to movies at home. I get distracted by my phone, or playing with the dog, or any other number of things. At the theater however, I don't have those distractions.
This irks me a lot. There used to just be trailers.. Maybe a coke commercial.. Now there are more ads than trailers. The most recent film I've seen in theaters was Deadpool & Wolverine, and even that was over 2 hours.. Comedy/Action flicks used to always be like tight 90 minutes.
Not even just that people were picking and choosing - when the Super Mario movie was released they bought up multiple screens at most cinemas, so anything else showing at the time got squeezed down to just a few screenings or pushed out entirely. There simply weren't enough tickets on sale to let the D&D movie make much more money at that point even if it had been getting sold out in the venues where it was still showing.
I generally feel that movies were better when they actually had to ration the use of special effects.
This is very true. I find this especially true in potential D&D films, where things would look a whole heck of a lot better to me if they just actually cast size-appropriate actors for many of the various species, rather than trying to follow LotR's footsteps of using greenscreens and forced perspective on regular-sized people to "shrink" them.
Nobody pays any attention to P+
I doubt this had any impact. It was due to being sandwhiched between John Wick 17 and Super Mario Brothers the blockbuster.
Yeap, folks have large screens and great sound systems plus internet to stream whatever they want, whenever they want. The theater experience needs to evolve.
I think its changing in ways that may not be appealing to older folk but not dying off.
This is one way to keep the theater going. Make it an event with something you cant simply do at home. Promote it like a social event too.
Paramount has had a lot of struggles and I dont think they are in shape to roll the dice on sequel.
I think it's kind-of frowned upon these days to choose people to play basically other species based purely upon their physical stature. "Oh, you're unusually short? Yeah, don't worry applying for the lead, you can be the garden gnome character."
I would have rather had a lower budget film with a group of PCs just starting out. Have them doing stuff that would be appropriate for levels 1-4. You could still have a dragon scene, followed by the party bravely running away. That, and there were scenes like the army fighting the black dragon that were just completely unnecessary. Cool looking, but unnecessary.
