Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
A couple of weeks back, Blumhouse and Meta announced that they were teaming up for an idea that was so obviously, on-the-face-of-it awful that it makes you kind of nervous: Clearly, that can’t be what they’re really trying to accomplish, right? So what are they actually trying to pull? But now, it’s come to pass: The debut of “Movie Mate,” a chatbot designed to vomit text onto your phone while you’re watching a movie, in an apparent bid to score the coveted “friendless, highly distractible, and easily impressed” demographic of film fan. The two companies rolled the tech out for a Wednesday night re-release of M3GAN, where audiences were encouraged to have their phones out so that “M3GAN” could talk to them during the movie—opening up bold new frontiers in audience boredom.
That’s not just us editorializing, either: The New York Times pulled some (admittedly, very anecdotal) accounts that suggested that having a bot text trivia factoids to your phone every few minutes is not actually an especially fun way to watch a movie, with one quoted user saying that she stopped looking at it after a few minutes, and instead just read all the messages after the movie was done. As with so much AI tech evangelism, Blumhouse then took this extremely muted, borderline hostile response and called it a win, stating that “The enthusiasm we saw from fans—especially younger ones—shows there’s real interest in finding ways to enhance, not replace, the fun of going to the movies.” (As for people suggesting this whole idea sucks absolute and unmitigated shit, is hostile to the art of filmmaking, communal audience experiences, and basic human decency as a whole—our phrasing, not theirs—a studio representative said, “Not everything is going to be for everybody.”)
All of this, obviously, is being powered by the flop-sweat mid-life crisis currently facing movie studios, who seem to be increasingly scared that the box office isn’t fully bouncing back from the delirious “peak right before bust” heights of 2019. It must, obviously, be the children’s fault, and what do children like? Screen-time, baby! (Meanwhile, Meta is clearly just happy to shove as many chatbots as it can into every walk of modern life, in the hopes that someday someone will stumble into an inadvertent use case for them.) No word on when, if ever, Movie Mate will be deployed again; the service was only activated for that one screening of M3GAN, with no plans to apply it even to Blumhouse’s own new releases.
