Movie roulette

Paula Mejía on the thrills of AMC’s Screen Unseen program.

Last Monday evening I parked at The Grove, an outdoor mall near West Hollywood that’s made appearances in Modern Family and The Hills, and made my way to the AMC. As an employee scanned my ticket inside the theater, I glanced up at the Cheesecake Factory located next door—a bizarre section of the restaurant where diners can peer down at the cinema through a glass vitrine. Even with its Bible-length laminated menu hawking a daunting selection of foods, the experience of eating there held more surety than what I was about to do.

I had no idea what movie I had purchased a ticket for. That was intentional. I booked a ticket through AMC’s “Screen Unseen”, wherein the company offers $7 tickets for movie roulette. Save for its MPAA rating and ballpark length, you have few clues about what you’re about to see—though it's always a movie that has yet to formally release in theaters—until the previews end. 

The specter of uncertainty was thick inside the three-quarters-full theater. The other intrepid moviegoers who’d signed up for this thrill ride were chatting amongst themselves, dishing on the breathless Reddit threads guessing what we might be in for. Could it be the latest Marvel installment? A24’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl? I was sober but felt a tiny buzz from the not-knowingness.

When the lights finally dimmed, the movie revealed itself: Last Breath, a new action-drama detailing the unlikely true story of an underwater cable repair diver left on the ocean floor sans oxygen. Between bites of popcorn, the audience murmured approvingly about where chance led us. I’d seen billboards around town advertising Last Breath in the weeks leading up to its release, but hadn’t looked into it further. With apologies to the leads Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, and Finn Cole, I doubt that I would’ve bought a ticket to see this movie on my own.

But as the show whirred on, I found myself thinking about the lost art of spontaneity. Los Angeles, where I live, is not a city designed to nurture impulse; it requires a different set of logistics to pull that off. Neither is Houston, Texas, where I grew up. But the difference has much to do with time (I have less of it now than when I was first aimlessly driving around at 16, bored and desperate to find anything to do) as it does with money (There’s more of it now, yet the cost of everything has spiked so significantly that a little impromptu outing is akin to having a hole in my pocket). The COVID years did not help our ongoing cultural unwillingness to give into something unplanned, either. People are nesting hard, sticking to their routines. It’s too expensive to just see what happens.

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While shoring up business on otherwise slow weeknights for AMC, something like “Screen Unseen” shrewdly taps into these sentiments: Consumers’ reticence to leave the familiarity of their couch unless it’s for an interesting experience, or at least a novelty popcorn bucket they can sell on eBay later. And, of course, the allure of showing up friends by being privy to a potential cultural moment that only insiders, like critics and film festival audiences, have seen thus far. 

AMC isn’t the only theater chain doing this. Regal has its own Monday Mystery Movie, Cinemark’s got the Secret Movie Series, and Marcus has the Mystery Movie. But even as movie theaters have struggled to compete with the convenience of at-home streaming—a recent survey by National Research Group and Roku revealed that 45% of respondents prefer catching a new release via streaming vs. going to a movie theater, though data also suggests there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two—this movie roulette tugs at another psychic reality of our world: Choice overload, the term coined by behavioral economists to describe the feeling of being so overwhelmed with possibility that it often leads one to choosing nothing. (Conan O’Brien pointedly riffed on this during Sunday’s Oscars; in the sketch, he asked: “Are you tired of streaming movies from your couch, from your kitchen, and your hand? What if I told you there was another way to stream movies?” before going on to introduce 800 smartphones glued together, aka a movie theater.)

It’s hard to say how popular these movie roulette offerings are, given that the respective theater chains don’t release data charting their mystery film ticket sales. But AMC’s revenue was up 18% last quarter compared to Q4 in 2023 (the same time the chain launched Screen Unseen), so there might be something to this wheel of fortune. 

As for Last Breath: The film had some flaws, but I was entertained for 90-ish minutes. And when I got home later, I dove into a rabbit hole about maintaining underwater fiber-optic cables. That’s more than I can say about the last thing Hulu’s algorithm suggested I watch. 🍿

ON SCREEN