Nobody is telling me about the movies I want to know about

The internet wasn't really a thing when I first became properly obsessed with movies, and I would only find out about new films through three-month-old magazines from the US and the UK, and going to the local library to read the newspapers and and actually seeing what films were playing in the big cities. 

I would drive for two hours to see Slacker or Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction (twice in one day with my mate Anthony, because we were exactly those types of nerds), and all I had to go on was the copies of the Christchurch Press that the local polytechnic got for their library. 

What there was, however, was advertising. Loads of it, in all the printed media, and in every advertisement break on the television. When a big film was coming out, there was plenty of hype. Something like the Batman films would have way more buzz than substance, and that's a template that has been regularly followed ever since.

The entire cinematic medium has changed a lot since those days, but sometimes I feel like it's still fucking 1992 again, because I only find out that some movies are out there in the world when they're at the actual cinema. 

It's even more awkward, because instead of having everything laid out on one page of a newspaper for easy perusal, I have to go to multiple websites to see what's playing at the various theatres in town. And the online PR push for movies seems to slide right by, because there is so much digital noise out there, and no decent sites with straight news instead of algorithm-driven drivel. Way too many no-name influencers in the hype cycle, and not enough fact. 

I only saw posters for the excellent Sinners on buses a week after it had been out - and that was it! -  and saw absolute nothing for Warfare, and almost missed the while thing.

The big promise behind the loss of online privacy is that your personal data was needed to give you advertisements that would be tailored to you, but that isn't happening. Going to the movies is something I actually want to spend my money on, but I'm not getting the information to do that.

There is a lot of talk about box office takings and how the marketing budget has to be taken into account, because that alone could double the cost of the movie's production. But I don't know where all that money is going, because I don't see shit I am actively looking for.