I went to Cineworld on Wednesday to watch the Inbetweeners and there were no adverts at all just a few film trailers, I went again today to watch the same film and there were 35 mins of adverts and rubbish!
The reason there were no adverts on the Wednesday is because the film was on a mid-week release.
Basically, cinemas run on a Friday to Thursday week and the adverts are allocated to the film from a Friday. If a film comes out in the middle of the week it won't have adverts in it until the Friday when the new instructions are given for the new week.
In the mornings the adverts are almost none or just very short, probably because companies don't see point in wasting £500 on advertising for an empty screen. I've noticed several films lately in the mornings that tend to have no adverts but just film trailers before the actual showing.
Its nothing to do with how many people are in the screen, its all done by the number of showings and the potential size of the film. These companies would rather pay a small amount more to run to an empty screen than pay a lot more because its running to a packed screen later in the day.
I wish the cinemas would do a poll and ask if the adverts influence us and are useful, so we can all vote NO
We pay to watch films, cinemas should charge less if they are upping the quota of adverts before films
Where the cartoons before films like they used too
If you ask the cinemas they'll all say the same thing: If they don't have the adverts they'll have to charge a lot more for tickets.
How true this is, I don't know, but there is a lot of money involved in this.
If you want the best chance of getting to a showing with minimal adverts then try and go earlier in the day. Basically there is a set of adverts allocated to each screen that the cinema are instructed to play. These adverts will generally be 10-15 minutes long so with the trailers they'll make the pre-show around 25-30 minutes.
What can happen though is a cinema can set up their schedule so that there are 2 films playing on a screen in the same day. As there is only one main set of advert these will be put into whichever film plays the last show of the day in that screen. That means that the other film will run a generic advert set which is usually less than 5 minutes.
It is possible now that some cinemas will run their early shows without any adverts at all, but this is only at cinemas that are still running 35mm prints. As sites switch over to being completely digital it will mean that all showings will have adverts with them.