A Rant on Cinema United

Welcome back to the blog readers. Over the last few years, a massive dream has been created for me: take the week-long trip to Las Vegas to attend CinemaCon: an industry event where studios sell their films to theater owners and select outsiders. John Campea has attended every one of these (except 2020 for obvious reasons) and I love his coverage of the event. So you can imagine when I heard that fans can spend $3.50 to see some of the footage that was shown at CinemaCon, I had to jump all over that. But when I heard of what exactly was in this 70-minute presentation, I was shocked to say the least. Especially because this post started off as something very different.

First off, I want to start with a little background. CinemaCon in its current format was started in 1975 by the then named National Alliance of Theatre Owners (NATO) as something called the ShoWest Convention. In 2011, the convention was renamed to CinemaCon and it currently stands as NATO's (now Cinema United) only official convention of theater owners controlled by Cinema United. It is now a standalone movie theater trade show that attracts more than just the members. There were some content creators there this year, and then the pundits like Campea and his crew, which consisted of his wife and brother-in-law, writer/director/producer Robert Meyer Burnett, and Olympic gold medalist Cody Miller.

Now a lot of films were shown off at CinemaCon this year, including looks at:

• The Running Man

• The Long Walk

• F1

• Avatar: Fire and Ash

• Wicked: For Good

• Superman

• The Fantastic 4: First Steps

• The Accountant 2

• Thunderbolts*

• Jurassic World Rebirth

• Good Fortune

• Piano Ballad

• Crime 101

• Is God Is

• Project Hail Mary

• Karate Kid: Legends

• Elio

• The Life of Chuck

• The Phoenician Scheme

• A full screening of How to Train Your Dragon

• Together

• The Naked Gun

• Weapons

• Caught Stealing

• The Roses

• A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

A lot of great films were shown at this event, so you can imagine Cinema United would have their pickings on what to preview in this 70-minute special screening. So please tell me why the fuck you thought it was a good idea to take a bunch of stuff that is available for FREE on YouTube and charge the audience $3.50 to watch that, and then put some of those same trailers in front of the "showcase?" That has to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen, even dumber than Marvel's "Chair Watch."

I unfortunately was going to use this post to talk about the footage that I saw, because some of everything Campea had promoted on this show I expected us to get. I even bought the ticket for this event, but when I saw on his show that people went to this thing and were completely disappointed I immediately requested a refund. I cannot believe that Cinema United tried to pull something like this off. Thank you all for reading this different than usual post, and I will see you for the next one.