Cineplex is hoping the element of surprise will help grab people's seats at a time when movie theaters are short on blockbusters.
Cinema chain Monday Surprise Premieres, which begins on November 10, promises an extended screening of the unreleased film at a reduced price. The catch is that you won't know what movie it is until it starts playing.
“No title. No trailer. No spoilers.” the ad says.
Theaters have struggled to seat people since the COVID-19 pandemic and are still far behind 2019 figuresas home streaming services have exploded in popularity. Recent Telefilm Canada Study found that ticket consumption per capita in 2024 was about half of 2019 levels.
Paul Moore, a professor at Metropolitan University of Toronto who studies the history of moviegoing, says the promotion will likely appeal mostly to die-hards while there will be fewer major cinematic results than usual, partly due to ongoing mergers in the film industry.
“There aren't many films this year and there aren't many hits,” he said.
Moore says surprise premieres have a long history, noting that “Hollywood pre-shows” were common in Toronto and other major cities in the 1970s and '80s.
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is also doing something similar with its Secret Movie Club.
Moore says the chain is interested in bringing back the idea in 2025, and suspects it plays into the “blind box” trend—or the idea of buying a collectible before knowing exactly what item you'll get.
“Labubu Film Version”
“It's not just the Happy Meal anymore. It's taken over the entire culture and has moved into adult culture. Labubuses are bought in a blind box, and it's toy of the year“, he said.
“I’m sure they hope it’s the film version of Labubu.”
He says the initiative also continues a long history of discounting on weekday evenings to attract people to theaters on non-weekdays.
Moore says $2 Tuesdays began in 1982 in industrial cities like Sudbury and Hamilton, which were particularly hard hit by the recession, and continued into the new millennium. Cineplex is still offering deals on Tuesdays.
To start, the company will hold surprise premieres every three months in 35 theaters across Canada.
Robert Cousins, senior vice president of motion pictures at Cineplex, says premieres could become more frequent and more locations added as studios get involved.
Cousins says audiences love “surprise and delight” and says tickets are selling well.
“I think we're all looking for ways that we can reinvigorate the guest experience of what we do, inspire them and make them feel special,” he said.
The professor is hopeful but skeptical
Sarah Bay-Cheng, a professor at the Center for Drama, Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, says it will be interesting to see whether the element of surprise is enough to attract people, especially in times of inflation and economic uncertainty.
She says people today get entertainment from a variety of sources, and since the pandemic they have come to expect their entertainment to be “high volume” and “low cost.”
“Even at the discounted price, you're essentially paying a monthly subscription and getting almost unlimited access to media to see one movie that you don't yet know about and don't yet know if you'll like it or not,” she said.
But Bei-Cheng hopes the initiative will bring some people back to theatres, and says creating a “sense of event” or live experience is the best thing theaters can do right now.
Bei-Cheng laments that people have fewer and fewer opportunities to share real-world experiences, and points to the recent Toronto Blue Jays World Series as an example of how powerful the feeling can be when people of different demographics are drawn into the same narrative.
“Our online niches are so specific, so fragmented, so compartmentalized that we are so unaware of what other people are watching, experiencing, etc.,” Bei-Cheng said.
“We've lost a lot of these public gathering places. And movie theaters and performing arts are great places to do that. So I'd like it to work and really capture the imagination.”
