Why AMC and Other Theaters Now Run 30 Minutes of Ads

Show up at the posted showtime for a movie in an AMC, Cinemark, or Regal theater today and you could be watching commercials for close to half an hour before the film actually starts. What used to be a 15-to-20-minute buffer of trailers and a few ads has stretched to as long as 30 minutes at the country's largest chains, and the reason isn't mystery or accident. It's a decade-long trade of ticket-price stability for advertising revenue, and audiences are starting to opt out of the part that was supposed to be the reward.

The deal that started it

The shift traces back to 2019, when Cinemark and Regal struck an agreement with National CineMedia to run additional commercials closer to the feature, including a premium "platinum spot" positioned right before the trailers begin. The theater chains reportedly collect 25% of the revenue those prominently placed ads generate. National CineMedia's CEO at the time, Tom Lesinski, predicted the move would go unnoticed by moviegoers, telling Deadline the practice was already standard overseas.

"We don't believe it will be a significant issue for exhibitors or consumers."

Tom Lesinski, then-CEO, National CineMedia

AMC, the largest chain in the country, held out. For years, executives worried the extra ad load would push away exactly the moviegoers the industry could least afford to lose after a pandemic that gutted attendance and a home-streaming boom that gave people every reason to just stay on the couch. Then, in 2025, AMC reversed course and joined its competitors, a decision the chain defended by pointing out that Cinemark and Regal had run the same ads for more than five years without any measurable hit to their own attendance.

The business logic underneath

The math is straightforward even if the audience experience isn't. The theatrical business has been under sustained pressure since home video first offered an alternative to leaving the house, and streaming turned that alternative into a habit; industry estimates put the share of Americans who now watch movies at home above 60%. Reclining seats and premium concessions haven't been enough to offset the shift on their own, so preshow advertising has become one of the few remaining levers theater chains can pull without raising ticket prices outright. It's a way to keep the lights on that doesn't show up on the receipt.

What makes cinema ad inventory valuable in the first place is the audience it captures: people seated, phones mostly away, with nowhere else to look. It's a captive-attention environment that's gotten rare in a fragmented media landscape. That's precisely why the trend has provoked so much resistance from the side of the business that depends on people actually watching what plays before the movie.

The audience found the workaround

Attendance itself has held up reasonably well, helped along by the "Barbenheimer" summer that made 2023 one of the strongest box office years in recent memory, but a more specific number is what's rattling studio marketing departments. Tracking firm EntTelligence, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, found that only about 60% of moviegoers were present for the trailers in 2025, and the figure was worse in the industry's two most important markets: just 42% of audiences in Los Angeles and 42% in New York caught the full trailer lineup, both numbers down from the year before. Thirty-six percent of moviegoers now say they deliberately time their arrival to skip the preshow entirely.

That's the tension nobody involved in the National CineMedia deal fully priced in. Trailers are still the single most effective tool the industry has for selling future tickets, and stretching the preshow to make room for more paid advertising is training audiences to arrive late enough to miss them.

Sony Motion Pictures Group chairman and CEO Tom Rothman put the contradiction bluntly to Deadline:

"What if a trailer plays in a movie theater and no one sees it? What good does it do? It's incredibly self-defeating and shortsighted. Since the beginning of the movie business, the single best inducement to see movies is trailers in movie theaters. And now, nobody sees them."

Tom Rothman, Sony Motion Pictures Group

It's the same instinct that's already reshaping how people budget their time at the multiplex more broadly — daybreakwire has looked before at how theaters engineer other parts of the moviegoing experience, from aggressive air conditioning on down, often for reasons that have little to do with what's actually on screen. The preshow is just the latest place where the chain's math and the audience's patience have stopped lining up. For now, the safest strategy if you actually want to see the trailers is the one theater chains would rather you not adopt: show up on time, and settle in for the ads.