With its ever-declining popularity since the 2020 pandemic, Platteville’s Millenium Cinema has come up with a new, immersive way to watch movies, and hopefully bring people back to the theater. This experience, coined “stimulation screens” will include smaller TVs and projectors to display additional media on the side walls and ceiling while the movie is playing.
New advisor and stockholder in Millenium Cinema, Robyn Banks, came up with the idea, saying, “We need new ways to appeal to younger demographics. Kids these days aren’t interested in a two-hour movie, they just want 10 second TikToks.” These screens will not play anything related to the current movie. Instead, they will display various other forms of media “just in case the kids get bored.”
Already, high school and college students have been raving about the potential usages for these new screens, with many expressing interest in returning to the theater. Student Jack Daniels said, “I’m pretty sure most people can’t sit in a theater without looking at their phone anyway. “Bout time they actually embraced that.” Banks also noted that their first move for the stimulation screens will be to add Family Guy clips and Subway Surfers gameplay as options.
Construction will be underway shortly, but that is not the only new development for the theater. “Looking forward, we want to do more to accommodate the shorter attention spans of Gen Z,” said Banks. “Our next step is to cut up movies into more digestible 30-second clips and allow viewers to decide how much of they want to watch.”
