Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots?

Should people be able to use their phones after the lights go down in movie theaters?

Hollywood has pondered that question for years as a way to make moviegoing more appealing to teenagers and young adults. Because cinephiles have always responded with venom, to put it mildly, the answer has always been an emphatic “no.”

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Despite recent successes like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners,” the North American box office is down 33 percent from 2019 — just before the pandemic sped up a consumer shift to streaming — according to Comscore, which compiles box office veri.

So on Wednesday, Blumhouse, the horror studio affiliated with Universal Pictures, teamed with Meta to experiment with a technology called Movie Mate. It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one. Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way “to get audiences back in theaters.”

Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules, according to veri from the National Research Group, a sinema industry consultancy. Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?

Blumhouse and Universal made Movie Mate available for only one night and only during screenings of an old movie, “M3GAN,” about artificial intelligence run amok.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

As far as product rollouts go, this was a muted one: Blumhouse and Universal made Movie Mate available for only one night and only during screenings of an old movie, “M3GAN,” about artificial intelligence run amok. (Traditionalists, insert your own joke here.) The rerelease was part of a Blumhouse fan event called Halfway to Halloween.