Cineplex is hoping an element of surprise will get people into seats at a time when movie theatres are short on blockbusters.
The theatre chain’s Monday Surprise Premieres, launching Nov. 10, promise an advanced screening of an unreleased movie at a discounted price. The catch is that you won’t know what the movie is until it starts playing.
“No title. No trailer. No spoilers,” the ad reads.
Theatres have struggled to get people in seats since the COVID-19 pandemic and are still lagging far behind 2019 numbers, as home streaming services have exploded in popularity. A recent Telefilm Canada study found ticket consumption per capita in 2024 was about half of what it was in 2019.
Paul Moore, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who studies the history of moviegoing, says the promotion will likely appeal mostly to diehards at a time with fewer big cinematic draws than usual, due in part to ongoing film industry mergers.
“There just aren’t as many movies and aren’t as many hit movies this year,” he said.
Moore says surprise premieres have a long history, noting “Hollywood sneak previews” were common in Toronto and other big cities in the 1970s and ’80s.
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) also does something similar with its Secret Movie Club.
Moore says it’s interesting for the chain to bring the idea back in 2025 and suspects it’s playing on the “blind box” trend — or the idea of buying something that’s collectible before knowing the exact item you’ll get.
‘Movie version of a Labubu’
“It’s not just for Happy Meals anymore. It’s taken over the whole culture and moved into adult culture, too. Labubus are bought in a blind box, and that’s the toy of the year,” he said.
“I’m sure they’re hoping it’s a movie version of a Labubu.”
He says the initiative also continues a long history of weeknight discounts to get people out to theatres on slow days.
Moore says $2 Tuesdays started in 1982 in industrial towns like Sudbury and Hamilton that were hit particularly hard by the recession and continued into the new millennium. Cineplex still offers some Tuesday discounts.
The company will roll out the surprise premieres every three months in 35 theatres across Canada to start.
Robert Cousins, senior vice president of film with Cineplex, says the premieres could become more frequent and add more locations as movie studios get on board.
Cousins says audiences have an appetite for “surprise and delight,” and says tickets have been selling well.
“I think we’re all looking at ways that we can reignite guests’ experiences into what we do, and excite them and make them feel special,” he said.
Professor hopeful, but skeptical
Sarah Bay-Cheng, a professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, says it will be interesting to see whether the element of surprise is enough to draw people, particularly in a time of inflation and economic insecurity.
She says people today get their entertainment from so many different sources, and since the pandemic have come to expect their entertainment to come at “high volume” and “low cost.”
“Even at a discounted price, you’re paying essentially a month subscription to almost unlimited media access to see one one film that you don’t know what it is and you don’t know yet if you’re going to like it or not,” she said.
But Bay-Cheng is hopeful the initiative will bring some people back to theatres, saying that creating a “sense of occasion” or live experience is the best thing theatres can do right now.
Bay-Cheng laments that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for people to have shared experiences in the real world, and mentions the Toronto Blue Jays’ recent World Series run as an example of how powerful the feeling can be when people across different demographics hook into the same narrative.
“Our online niches are so specific and so atomized, so separate, that we are so unaware of what other people are looking at, experiencing, etc.,” Bay-Cheng said.
“We’ve lost a lot of those kinds of communal gathering spaces. And movie theatres, performing arts, those are great spaces for that. So I would love for this to work, and for this to really capture the imagination.”
