Say this about new AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron: The guy knows how to make a splash.
Just four months into his tenure, the 61-year-old businessman told Variety that he’s open to the possibility of allowing texting and cellphone use in some of the company’s theaters.
“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,” Aron told the publication. “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.”
Not surprisingly, the announcement drew the collective fury of the moviegoing masses.
A lot of folks, it turns out, find texting at the movies to be a highly intolerable offense, and one by one Thursday, those individuals — including some millennials — took to Twitter to voice their displeasure.
Some mocked those unable to go two hours without checking a phone. Others vowed never to return to an AMC theater if the company went ahead with the move.
The issues of texting and movie theaters has proven a touchy subject in the past. As Variety pointed out, a similar announcement from Regal Entertainment’s CEO a few years back was met with significant backlash. What’s more, the combination of texting and theaters once ended tragically. In 2014, a Florida man was charged with second-degree murder after killing a fellow moviegoer who had been texting inside a theater.
So while Aron addressed a number of topics in the Variety interview — AMC’s planned merger with Carmike, the 2016 CinemaCon conference — it was his comments on texting that garnered the most attention.
@CEOAdam I am a millennial and will never visit an AMC again if you allow texting. Would ruin the one thing theaters have left — ambience!
— Craig (@cromas) April 14, 2016
#AMC to allow texting in movie theaters? We stopped going to theaters BECAUSE of people texting and posting on #SocialMedia during movies‼️
— Tamara Davis 🇺🇸 (@warriors_mom) April 14, 2016
@AMCTheatres Don’t feed that monster. If you make policy allowing texting in ANY theater, I’ll never visit an AMC again, and I go often.
— TheAbsoluteJay (@TheAbsoluteJay) April 14, 2016
By Thursday afternoon, the company was already addressing the “passionate” response to Aron’s comments, pointing out that a text-friendly shift was far from a done deal.
“It has been reported that AMC is in the earliest stage of exploring an option of someday having a very limited number of texting-friendly auditoriums,” AMC said in a statement. “However, given that so many of today’s moviegoers are passionate about preserving the purity of watching movies undisturbed in our theatres, there is no specific timeframe as to when we might introduce such a test, if ever.
“While we recognize that there is a growing population that is continuously connected to their phones, above all we also remain extremely sensitive that the overwhelming majority of our current audience does not want texting to disrupt their experience. We would only introduce a concept like this when we are totally confident that we can fully satisfy the desires of our current guests.”
Dugan Arnett can be reached at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
