Why can’t people wait? Every day when you go out on the Internet or turn on the TV, there is some news about some upcoming movie. There is hardly a day that goes by without an update on the Age of Ultron or the Batman versus Superman movie. You know what? I don’t want to have already seen the movie before I go to the movie. They start putting out clips one after another. Have you ever gone to see a comedy, and after you have sat through it, you realize that you already saw the funniest lines from the clips you saw weeks earlier? Doesn’t that suck?
Do you remember the first Batman movie with Michael Keaton? They may have leaked pictures of that Batmobile before the movie, but I never saw them. So when I watched the movie and Batman rescued Vicki Vale from the Joker, dashed out of the building, and I got to see the Batmobile for the first time, I was blown away. What about the famous scene from Jaws where the Sheriff is ladling chum over the side of the boat, and the shark suddenly appears. I remember that scene almost made me piss my pants. I am so incredibly grateful that it had not been a clip before the movie.
I understand that people get curious and I know that the tabloids are constantly trying to one up the other for readership, but by our collective inability to simply say “No, I’ll wait for the movie”, we deflate our expectations, and rob ourselves of the full experience. We lose the mystery of the moment when we get to sit in a darkened theater and behold for the very first time what the storyteller intended to share with us.
You may simply say, don’t read the articles, but they are inescapable. They are on your browser as soon as it launches, with blurry picture of Ben Affleck in a Batman suit, or on the TV in what we laughingly call “The Nightly News”.
I don’t know if it will ever be possible again to roll back to the times when you waited with expectation for the premier of a movie, but I certainly hope it will. I know the studios want to whip up excitement so they are behind this effort as well. I just really think it would be great if we could all just take a freaking chill pill and not have the impatience of a three year old.
