Below Milk Dud level
So it’s come to this: the head of a Hollywood studio objects to popcorn, fercrissake.
One of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood … would like to see cinemas selling healthier snacks.
Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures, says that audiences would be better off nibbling on granola bars, fruit salad, yogurt and vegetable crudités with dips. “I can almost imagine the Romans eating popcorn and drinking Coke at the Colosseum 2,000 years ago,” he told a convention of cinema owners in Las Vegas. “But by bringing healthier snacks into your concession stands you would be helping our country meet an urgent public health need.”
I generally confine myself to a single pack of Raisinets, but I’ll be double-damned and pickled in brine before I’ll spend $7.50 for a medium-sized Yoplait.
Of course, Lynton doesn’t give a flip about that. Hollywood routinely extracts the lion’s share (in its literal sense, which means “damn near all of it”) of ticket-sale proceeds, which means that the cinemas have to make it up at the concession stand, and there aren’t enough soul-dead health obsessives out there to justify a Big Unbuttered Arugula.
If he wants to do the movie-going public a favor, this should be top of his list: Release better films. We eat more when we’re bored.
(Via Bill Quick, who properly styles “food nazis” in lowercase.)
Tom »
18 March 2010 · 2:08 pm
The concession prices have had me smuggling in my own tidbits for years, but that takes away my ability to blame someone else for my weight gain (the increase poundage isn’t the sole location of my binges). That’s the only downside in this – no-one to blame!
LeeAnn »
18 March 2010 · 3:35 pm
I have over the many years smuggled all kinds of nosh into the movies. Candy, chips, pretzels, fries, and more than once, sushi.
I just can’t force $5 out of my wallet for old popcorn. It won’t come out.
Laura »
18 March 2010 · 3:46 pm
I smuggle food in too. Once I smuggled in a bacon sandwich the size of my head. I think it was when I went to see “Armageddon.” Doomsday movies make me crave bacon.
Lisa Paul »
18 March 2010 · 3:50 pm
There is nothing wrong with popcorn. Especially fresh popped — in a proper popper not a microwave — and topped with just a bit of real butter. Luckily, the excellent old movie palace here in Sonoma, the Sebastiani Theater, makes fresh pop corn in the half hour before the movie and tops it with real organic, locally produced butter. And I’ll gladly pay extra for that (although they’ll sell you Raisinettes and Jujubes, if you’d prefer.)
Jeffro »
18 March 2010 · 10:11 pm
Oh, just give me the big bucket of corn slathered with artery clogging coconut oil that gets all over everything. I’m not picky.
Nancy Reyes »
21 March 2010 · 8:36 pm
the ancient Mayans/Aztecs might have been munching on popcorn while watching the spectacle of cutting hearts out of their enemies for entertainment, but one doubts that the ancient Romans were able to import enough popcorn from the Mississippian mound builders to eat it watching the lions munch on Christians.