AMC Theaters Plans to Allow Texting During Movies Because “You Can’t Tell Millennials to Turn off Their Cellphones”

The zombie apocalypse is already here, ladies and gentlemen.

You know that thing that happens when you pay $10 to watch a movie but some 22-year-old next to you just can’t stop checking his or her cellphone the way a crackhead just can’t seem to stop smoking crack?

And by the time you get past the first ten minutes, you are contemplating how you will get through the next hour and twenty of them without yanking the kid’s phone out of his/her hand and chucking it across the room while bellowing a Hulksmash scream of pure rage, or stomping it into a million pieces to stop your head from exploding because in what insane world do we live where more and more people can’t seem to do anything including pay to watch a movie (that isn’t a phone) without a damn phone?

Well, now in an interview with Variety, new AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron is talking about trying to find a way to allow texting during movies because, well, there’s just no way to tell 22-year-olds they can’t have their cellphones:

Would appealing to millennials involve allowing texting or cellphone use?

Yes. When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.

That’s just sad that a 22-year-old has devolved into an android with a cellphone as a body part and if you try to take it away from them, they simply cannot function as a human being anymore. Continuing —

At the same time, though, we’re going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t disturb today’s audiences.

Gee, and what way would that be exactly? To have a film showing in two theaters? One for people who actually went to a theater to do something crazy like pay to watch a movie, and the other for technozombies who can’t seem to function without the ability to text their every waking thought and check Facebook every other five seconds?

Movie theater technozombie segregation?

Uproxx:

If there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that movie theaters need more people screwing around with their phones. Hundreds of people just staring down at their glowing screens, illuminating the darkened room, tappety-tapping out text messages to each other like “lol literally me” while Spider-Man or whoever is doing superhero-type things on the giant screen all of them paid over $10 to kind of look at. This is what we want. To make movies better.

Perhaps that’s the real question. Why are company CEOs bowing to spoiled phone zombies? What effed up world are we living in where “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone”?

Yes you can actually. It’s really easy. You simply open your mouth and say, “Hey, did you come here to this movie theater to do something crazy like watch a movie? Oh, you did? Then why don’t you actually WATCH IT.”

The Alamo Drafthouse theater chain based in Austin, Texas knows all about this. They have one simple rule: talk or text during the movie, you’re out. As in, you and your cellphone are kicked out.

It’s one of the reasons people who go to theaters to actually watch movies love going there to watch movies — the guarantee some cellphone zombie isn’t going to ruin the entire film.

Below is an actual voicemail message left at Alamo by someone who got kicked out for texting. The Drafthouse turned it into a commercial that has been played before the films start.