How Many Commercials Does it Take to Get to the Movie?

Perhaps you have been at the theater and wondered if the movie was ever going to start. Perhaps you have even found yourself wondering exactly how many commercials it takes to get to the movie?

We always thought this was one of those unanswerable questions like 'Which came first the chicken or the egg."  "Where did Cain get his wife."  "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop."

The world may never know the answers to these ponderable questions, but we can know the answer to the movie question because I have actually counted them.

Recently, we were at Grand Junction's Regal Cinemas for a movie. We always get there good and early to get our desired seats, so there's always at least a 30-minute wait for the previews to kick in. I've noticed -as I'm sure many others have as well--that there is an awful lot of commercials packed into the 30 minutes leading up to the movie.

Exactly how many commercials you ask? Well, I'm sure the exact number varies from movie to movie and theater to theater, but in this case, the number of commercial spots was a whopping 33. Are you kidding me? 33! Of course, there was some entertainment content thrown in there, but when you throw in 30+ commercials it doesn't leave a lot of room for much else.

The only thing I can say about it is that as uncompelling as the commercial messages might have been,  watching 33 commercials was certainly a better alternative to staring at a blank, lifeless screen for 30 minutes - and the movie theater knows it!