Best or Worst?

By now, any of my regular readers (assuming I have readers) must be aware that I spend a lot of time looking for products and organizations that have failed in amusing or instructive fashions – partly because I’m a business strategy teacher and a former failure analyst, and partly for my own amusement. To be fair, I have often brought you stories about the strange, bizarre and wonderful new ideas that turn up from time to time, some of which have actually lived up to the hype that their inventors and I have given them. This goes a long way toward explaining why the “Stupid” tag and the variations on the “Innovations” tag are so common on these posts. But much more infrequently, I will find a story online that might be either the smartest or the dumbest thing I have ever seen – or possibly both at once. Such was the case with the new movie theater design I read about today...

You can pick up the original story off the MSN home page if you want more detail, but the basic idea is that somebody decided to make a movie theater into an indoor playground. It’s got a typical screen and audio/visual equipment, but it also has a slide, a jungle gym, and various things to jump on, run around, and play with. They’re apparently going to include both conventional seating for adults (parents, one assumes) and kid-friendly seating areas like beanbag chairs and such. Since it’s difficult for smaller children to sit still and watch anything for two hours or more anyway, the people behind these facilities appear to have gone entirely the other way. Rather than trying to get people to be quiet and show respect for the other customers, they’re building a place where people can just let their kids do whatever they want…

Personally, I can’t think of any venue that would have less value for me, but then I don’t have (and do not ever expect to have) responsibility for any small children. I’m not the sort of person who takes children to age-inappropriate events, either, or at least I don’t think I am. Although I will concede that there are some people of my acquaintance who will never be able to watch a movie without annoying the crap out of everyone else in the building, and some of them are now well into middle age. But whatever the exact demographic of customers using these kid-friendly movie venues turns out to be, my strategy for dealing with them is simply not to go to any. The real question, from where I’m sitting, is what effect this will have on movie viewing experiences in other venues…

On the one hand, the existence of movie theaters in which the kids can run around and make all of the noise they want to might be a good thing. If we can convince any significant percentage of families with rambunctious children to go to such venues and leave the rest of us in peace, that could mean fewer disruptive children screaming and running around when we’re trying to watch a movie. On the other hand, I’m not sure that training people to assume that a given venue should make special provisions to accommodate their children is a good idea. It isn’t hard to imagine people who have grown up running wild in venues where they would normally be required to have some consideration for the other customers growing up to believe that they should always be allowed to do just as they like…

Of course, we should probably also concede that in recent years we have all witnessed increasing numbers of nominal adults who behave that way anyway. And we have already seen the appearance of movie theaters that do not tolerate any noise or disruption during the presentation, such as the Alamo Drafthouse organization, which does not permit very young children onto the premises at all. So maybe the idea of venues that serve the specific needs of a particular demographic group really is a brilliant idea; it might even be a way for this struggling industry to recover some of the market share it has lost to Blu-ray, DVRs, and Pay-Per-View/On-Demand cable services. Or perhaps this is the beginning of the end of movie-going as we know it…

I still can’t decide...