Film fans can expect more advertising on big screen - Ad forecasters at ZenithOptimedia said on Monday that spending on in-theater ads, usually shown before the trailers, rose by 18% this year to $400 million — and likely will go up by about 15% each year through 2008. By Laura Petrecca and David Lieberman. [Movies & Music]

The three biggest movie theatre companies in the US, Regal, AMC, and Cinemark, have all decided to use cineMedia as their primary outlet for advertising during movies.

This new commitment has spent $150 million in the last three years to install new digital media projectors for ad reels. This new system allows for ads to be downloaded via a satellite and change more frequently without having to worry the actual theatres about moving around trailers and slides. This is all due to a decline in advertising receipts from movie theatres in the past few years. Now that these three huge theatre companies have all joined with cineMedia, there are plans to increase the length of ads by 15% each year until 2008, after already rising by 18% this year alone. This means we will have to endure even longer periods of waiting for a movie to start while we are at the theatre.

As much as I enjoy going to the movies, I don't enjoy having to watch the same advertisements over and over again. It is always entertaining to see brand new trailers that are released with new movies, but I don't see the point of showing me the King Kong trailer on every movie since this past summer. Generally people will become angry over this change due to the fact that not everybody wants to sit through half an hour of advertisements before a movie that they could have possibly been dragged to. I think we all remember when a lady sued the makers of the second Lord of the Rings feature when the distributing company thought it was a good idea to include 12 trailers, which came out to a little over thirty minutes before the movie would actually start. That doesn't include Technicolor, coke and other advertisements that might also be included in the movie pre-show. When a movie is three hours long, I do not find it necessary to increase the amount of trailers in ratio to the features duration. I feel now that advertising and greed is going to ruin another great pastime.