Theater Owners Want Trailers to Be Shorter, Among Other Crazy Things

The Hollywood Reporter reported this week that the National Association of Theater Owners is considering new rules that would govern movie marketing. NATO (seriously, that's what they call themselves) primarily wants studios to cap pre-movie trailer length to two minutes, which is about 30 seconds shorter than normal.

We guess those trailers can add up when theaters run eight or nine at a time and twenty minutes goes by between lights down and movie start. Real film junkies don't seem to mind, do they? NATO's big gripe is that the movie-going public blames them for trailers that run too long or give away too much of a movie's plot. They've heard of the internet, right?

Beyond that, they want to limit movie marketing to four months before their release, including trailers. They also want to require that a film's release date be on all marketing materials. All of those seem unnecessarily nit-picky, don't you think?

None of these things is at all set in stone, just being considered. It's important to remember, the people considering such arbitrary rules are the same people who invented the 4 billion percent mark-up for popcorn and sugar water. Yeah, those people don't want to annoy theatergoers. Sure.