Regal, Cinemark commit to full captioning
Regal and CInemark, the nation's first and third largest theater chains respectively, have reaffirmed their commitment to full movie captioning, and have stated that the capability will be in place by the end of 2012.
Regal's announcement came in the form of a corporate press release dated May 4. That release appears to clarify what had previously been mixed signals. While Regal officials filed a declaration in our Washington lawsuit saying that Regal planned full captioning, the official corporate position articulated in official filings with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission had been that Regal was "considering its options." Evidently, that consideration led to a formal decision to provide full accessibility for patrons with hearing loss.
The announcement appears to apply to all Regal theaters, including those that Regal operates under the Edwards or United Artist nameplates.
The press release also noted that Regal will partner with Captionfish, the website that lists captioned and subtitled movies around the country, and which is becoming the go-to site for captioning information.
Regal is going to employ closed captioning, in which the captions are visible only to individuals that obtain and use a personal viewing device. In Seattle, the first market where Regal has completed installation of captioning equipment, Regal is testing special eyewear -- glasses that project the captions on the lens itself. Although somewhat ungainly lookling, the glasses have received very positive reviews from Wash-CAP members who have used them.
The closed captioning will substitute for the open-caption showings that Regal has offered at a few locations, and which some users prefer. The trade-off, though, is that instead of only a few locations and a few often-inconvenient show-times, the closed captioning will be available every day for all showings of all movies for which captions have been prepared by the studios.
Cinemark has also committed to full closed captioning. While Cinemark had already equipped all of the auditoriums at its Federal Way and Olympia multiplexes in Washington to show closed-captioned movies, the nationwide commitment came in the form of a press release issued last week. The press release announced the amicable resolution of a lawsuit filed in California by the Association of Late Deafened Adults and two individuals. I represented the plaintiffs in that action, in partnership with Disability Rights Advocates, a public-interest law firm in Berekely, California.
The captioning capability will be introduced as part of Regal and Cinemark's conversion to digital projection, in which traditional film ceases to exist, and the movies are reduced to digital data, transmitted either over the internet or on computer discs to the individual theaters. Captions can be included in that digital package. The captions are transmitted wirelessly from the projector/servers in each auditorium to the viewing devices.
Among the major theater chains, the holdout now is AMC, which has not yet committed to any particular amount of captioning. We think that will be a difficult position to maintain, especially in light of the commitments made by Regal and Cinemark. The first test of the legal soundness of AMC's position will come later this month, when we have final arguments in the lawsuit Wash-CAP filed against the major corporate theater chains in Seattle.
