The Regal Movie Quote Commercial is an Abomination That Must Be Stopped! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

In the six months or so that I have been venturing to the movie theaters every week to watch and write about a new movie that my paid subscribers have voted for me to see for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas I have become a big fan of the Regal theaters.

I am more specifically a fan of their Regal Unlimited promotion, where you can see as many films as you’d like for twenty-three dollars a month. If you go to the theaters four or five times a month at least, as I do, then you end up saving a lot of money.

I am a fan of saving money. I am NOT a fan of a pre-show Regal ad that has been the bane of my existence for months now because I see it every time I see a movie.

The premise of this spot is that moviegoers LOVE famous movie lines. Who doesn’t love hearing random jackasses smugly spout catchphrases originally uttered by legendary thespians in some of the greatest movies of all time?

Some of you are probably too young to remember this, but back in the late 1990s and early oughts EVERYONE was quoting Austin Powers ALL THE TIME. It didn’t matter where you were. You could be watching the State of the Union Address and Clinton would get an impish look on his face and slide a “Yeah, baby!”, “Shagadelic!” or “Do I make you horny?” into his speech, to wild clapping and delight.

Later on a funny-talking foreigner with a real genius for saying the exact wrong thing named Borat stole our hearts and had us all reciting his many hilarious catchphrases for years and years and years.

Did quoting Austin Powers make people horny? Yeah, baby!

I’m being sarcastic, of course. There are few things in the world more awkward and annoying than going about your day like a reasonable human being and then having some bastard make himself chuckle by repeating a famous movie line that has tremendous significance or importance to them but not to you.

What can you do? You just stand there awkwardly waiting for the moment to pass with a feigned smile and forced chuckle.

I see this dumb fucking commercial all the time…which is nice!

The Regal ad that I despise very wrongly assumes that if people like hearing one movie catchphrase de-contextualized and robbed of its humor and eloquence then they’ll love an ad that’s nothing BUT annoying people delivering famous movie catchphrases with expressions so annoying they induce actual rage.

So this weekly headache of a Regal promo shows patrons and the staff of a Regal theater delivering a dispiriting gauntlet of words that might have been funny once, in their original context, but are deeply unfunny by the time they made it into this abomination.

The idea is to combine catchphrases from all-time classics like Casablanca and The Godfather with movies that it considered new classics or pop classics.

A new classic or pop classic is basically a movie that does great in theaters and then plays forever on cable and is quoted extensively by jackasses.

The pop classics obnoxiously referenced here include Dumb and Dumber, Elf, Caddyshack, Almost Famous, Beverly Hills Cop, Airplane, Anchorman, Tommy Boy, Mean Girls, The Goonies, Clueless and The Hangover.

These are largely entertaining, well-liked movies, if not exactly masterpieces, but hearing them smushed together in this awful context just makes me hate them.

Poor Danny Trejo has even been pulled into this mess. He’s the sole movie star/celebrity in the clip but not even he can make this seem like anything other than a very bad idea terribly executed.

Then again this spot is memorable and leaves a strong impression, albeit negative, and that’s kind of the point of commercials.

I am writing about this dismal piece of what is euphemistically called pre-show entertainment, after all, and I suppose poor press and bad attention is better than no press or attention at all.

So I implore Regal to stop running these spots. Please. Stop it! Don’t punish me and the rest of us Regal Unlimited big shots for being regular moviegoers.

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