I managed a small movie theater in the 1980s (and was also the projectionist, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887809 https://news.ycombinator.com/ite

I managed a small movie theater in the 1980s (and was also the projectionist, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887809). By that time, audiences were conditioned to follow the posted schedules in the lobby and newspapers. The businesses (many of them parts of corporate chains) were structured to not deviate from the schedules - booth staffing, employees' work schedules, theater cleanings, and other tasks were keyed to it. Customers were expected to show up within 15 minutes before the starting time, and leave when the house lights came up. If a customer came really late and asked to stay to see the start of the next showing we would have let them but it would be regarded as weird. It's a linear story - what's the point of watching the beginning if you already know what happens at the end? And who wants to sit around for 15 minutes while the theater is cleaned? Tangential: When we first got Hunt For Red October another projectionist spliced the reels wrong. Each film came in octagonal cans, typically six 20 minute sections, before they were manually spliced together on two bigger reels of about an hour apiece. IIRC sections 5 and 6 were switched. People complained ... but no one wanted to stay to watch it again in the proper order. ETA: Come to think of it, there was an audience segment which seldom followed posted movie schedules: porn. In the 80s, there were still porn theaters in the seedier parts of town (for Boston, it was the "Combat Zone" on the edge of Chinatown) with films running all day and night and people could come and go as they pleased. Not many were interested in linear stories. I didn't work in that part of the business, but the old guy who licensed me for the state indicated that the bulk of his licensing work was down there. This was pre-WWW and not everyone had VCRs, and even if you did the only way to get tapes was via specialty stores in the Zone or sketchy mail order operations.