{"id":8785,"date":"2025-05-03T20:27:41","date_gmt":"2025-05-04T00:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2025\/05\/03\/meta-and-blumhouse-create-chatbot-that-encourages-phone-use-during-movies\/"},"modified":"2025-05-03T20:27:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T00:27:41","slug":"meta-and-blumhouse-create-chatbot-that-encourages-phone-use-during-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2025\/05\/03\/meta-and-blumhouse-create-chatbot-that-encourages-phone-use-during-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta and Blumhouse Create Chatbot That Encourages Phone Use During Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Should people be able to use their phones after the lights go down in movie theaters?<\/p>\n

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 \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

But desperate times call for desperate measures.<\/p>\n

Despite recent successes like \u201cA Minecraft Movie\u201d and \u201cSinners,\u201d the North American box office is down 33 percent from 2019 \u2014 just before the pandemic sped up a consumer shift to streaming \u2014 according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.<\/p>\n

So on Wednesday, Blumhouse, the horror studio affiliated with Universal Pictures, teamed with Meta to experiment with a technology called Movie Mate. It\u2019s 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\u2019s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way \u201cto get audiences back in theaters.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n

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Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it\u2019s against the rules, according to data from the National Research Group, a film industry consultancy. Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n

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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, \u201cM3GAN,\u201d about artificial intelligence run amok. (Traditionalists, insert your own joke here.) The rerelease was part of a Blumhouse fan event called Halfway to Halloween.<\/p>\n

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