AMC To Add Onscreen Captions at Some Locations

AMC Entertainment, the largest movie theater chain in the world, will offer open captioning at 240 locations in the United States, a move that the company's chief executive described as 'a real advance for those with hearing difficulties or where English is a second language.' From a report: Movie theaters provide closed captioning through devices that some customers describe as inconvenient and prone to malfunctioning. Open captions, however, are displayed on the screen in a way similar to subtitles; everyone in the theater sees the same captions, on the same screen. Advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing have long sought more and higher-quality captioning, but theater owners worry that people who aren't deaf simply don't like seeing captions at the movies.

'In some cases, putting open captions on the screen diminishes ticket sales for the movie,' said John Fithian, the president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, although he noted that the evidence was mostly anecdotal. He said the industry, whose business has been battered by the pandemic, was studying the relationship between open captions and ticket sales. Christian Vogler, a professor at Gallaudet University, a school in Washington that serves the deaf, said in an email, 'Detractors of open captions often have argued that the wider hearing audience would revolt over them, or that these would be a losing business proposition for theaters.' He praised AMC's move, which was announced last week, saying, 'The fact that a large national chain has had a change of heart is significant, and may even open the floodgates for others to follow suit.'

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