Thoughts & Prayers to AMC Movie Theater Employees During the Upcoming Avengers: Endgame 24-Hour Marathon Madness

We’re just days away from the opening of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, and the movie has reportedly broken records for ticket presales. Demand has been so high that AMC is planning round-the-clock screenings, keeping a number of locations open 24 hours a day Thursday through Sunday.

Setting aside the question of who has the stamina to watch a 3AM screening of a three-hour movie, my mind immediately goes to those poor movie theater employees who are now going to be expected to work through the night for what I assume is minimum wage, or close to it.

Inverse’s (and Mary Sue contributor) Eric Francisco tweeted his hope Monday that those employees would get some sort of bonus.

Spoiler: They don’t. A bunch of current and former movie theater (and specifically AMC) employees responded that they most definitely do not get overtime or any sort of bonus. Apparently, the corporate benevolence starts and ends with pizza (one slice of Domino’s per employee, by some accounts) and possibly Red Bull.

Another AMC employee said they don’t even get holiday pay, which I didn’t know was legal, and given how our national Christmas afternoon pastime is a trip to the movies, that seems especially rotten.

There’s a surprising number of people in that Twitter conversation expressing anger that a bonus for those movie theater employees would even be suggested, since lots of people work super early/late hours at Starbucks or 24-hour diners and the like. (You know, businesses where, as unfun as that may be, those hours are an expected part of the job description, unlike a movie theater, which decided to add these shifts the week before.)

That sort of I suffer so everyone should suffer and never complain attitude feels like a smaller-scale version of the week’s most mockable tweet. (I know it’s only Tuesday, but it’s hard to imagine anything could surpass this beauty in the coming days.)

If you go see Endgame this weekend—especially if you go to a middle-of-the-night screening—make sure to be a little extra kind to those people responsible for cleaning up your spilled popcorn while their corporate bosses rake in that extra income.

(image: bkmcneal on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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