If the prized demographic (18-34 year old males) is becoming a smaller percentage of prime time television viewers why the fuck do they get to decide what stays and what goes?

It's not a market like selling cars to people where a car that appeals to a lot of well-off people makes good money and 18-year-olds are a niche market. It's a market of selling viewers to advertisers where 18-year-olds are the rare ingredients that make the rich people come to your restaurant. The more elusive they get, the more they can charge, like truffles, and the masses are just ground meat.

If my theory is correct then there should be more movies targeted to well-off people than TV shows. I don't know if that's true.

But the movies aren't trying to sell advertising time for Mercedes Benz or whatever, they're selling a $6-$12 ticket. How likely is it that rich people are going to buy enough tickets to make up for something that's more friendly to the masses?

the movies aren't trying to sell advertising time for Mercedes Benz or whatever

When I go to movies, I'm being advertised to, both inside the movie and before it.

Movie theatres make almost no money off of tickets. They make money off of showing advertising reels, and concessions.

Well, product placement, true. But I think habitual lateness tends to protect me from the prior advertising most of the time—I'm lucky if I catch any previews in the theatre.

At any rate, I was probably speaking more to the issue of what studios are trying to sell, rather than the theaters. Which makes it less of a one-to-one comparison to TV, I guess.

I'm lucky if I catch any previews in the theatre.

!! Wha!! previews are the bestest.

msbelle speaks the truth. I'm really irritated by what the theater we usually go to (since it actually has student tickets) does.

They intersperse the slideshow with the trailers.

Seriously. There will be those ads for a few minutes, and then a trailer. And then more ads, and another trailer. So you have to watch the trailers with the lights on. And the sound not cranked up to superstereo. And they lose all the trailer momentum since you keep coming back to the fucking jumbles and quizzes. They do show one or two trailers after the lights go off and the sound's in place, but gah.

Does that happen after the movie's advertised start time?

AMC here shows slides, then ads, and then when the start time rolls round we get previews, and then the keep quiet stuff, and then movie.

UA/Regal theatres also now have "The Twenty," which is a 20-minute ad/trailer package that runs before the scheduled start time of the movie (instead of slides informing me where I can eat after the movie, and that the rock garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens is in bloom). So by the time the movie starts, if you've gotten to the theatre early enough, you've seen 30-40 minutes of ads and trailers. It's exhausting.

I have no Nielsen box.

Which reminds me, they contacted us the other day. Mr. H wants to do it, but I can't imagine the weird data they'll get from us during the summer. It'll be The Inside, Dallas, Melrose Place, Knots Landing, NOW, Lehrer NH, mixed with reruns of my very favorites- mostly Lost and VM to pick up pieces of their mysteries I may have missed.