Any other year, Will Smith, Jennifer Lawrence, and Chris Pratt would have been enough to charm the socks off the cinema suits from multiplexes all around America. But this year’s CinemaCon—the annual Las Vegas convention where Hollywood's biggest studios present their upcoming film slate to theaters owners—was different, and the world's biggest movie stars weren’t talked about nearly as much as the newbie who wasn't even presenting at the convention: Screening Room, Sean Parker’s plan to shake up the movie industry by offering new releases to at-home viewers for $50 a pop.

Since news of Screening Room broke last month, Parker, who previously upset the music industry by co-founding Napster at 19, has garnered support (and in some cases, investments) from heavy-hitting filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson. Screening Room has also amassed the white-hot hatred of the theater industry, which has argued that eliminating the 90-day window between theatrical and at-home releases will collapse their already declining business. But Parker is pitching Screening Room as a means to go after the younger demographic that has stopped going to the theater entirely, with a $150 home set-up that will be piracy-proof. To sweeten the deal for exhibitors, he has even offered them a 20 percent kickback should they join him.

Judging by the number of barely veiled Screening Room digs made by CinemaCon's studio heads and filmmakers throughout the week, though, support from exhibitors will be damn-near-impossible to buy. The enterprise was alluded to so much all week that one attendee observed, “It's almost like Screening Room was Voldemort, ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.’ I was almost happy when James Cameron, on the final day of presentations, came out and attacked Screening Room by name."

Cameron surprised CinemaCon on Thursday during Fox's presentation, where he all but took a blood oath to protect “the sanctity of the in-theater experience.” He added, “Regardless of what the folks associated with the Screening Room say, I think it’s absolutely essential for movies to be offered exclusively in theaters upon initial release. Boom!" As if that were not enough, the Titanic filmmaker promised four more Avatar sequels in what started to feel like some kind of pledge drive for the sinking film industry.

Actually, every studio pledged some manner of sequel, adaptation, or spinoff—as if the built-in audience from the original project would resurrect the industry from its ashes and bury each multiplex in money. Among the offerings: Baywatch, Monopoly, Neighbors 2: Sorority Uprising, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, Finding Dory, The Lego Batman Movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, Power Rangers, Independence Day: Resurgence, Trolls, and Warcraft. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, the fine actors who played Macbeth and Lady Macbeth last year, have since swapped Shakespeare for Assassins Creed, a movie based on a popular Playstation game. And sequels are so omnipresent that Sony, to differentiate itself from the pack, concocted a double-decker sequel—the 22 Jump Street/Men in Black crossover MIB 23!

Things began to look especially dire when CinemaCon's audience—the people who decide what will be in theaters and for how long—reserved its wildest applause not for Smith, Lawrence, or other Oscar winners like Russell Crowe, but for Vanilla Ice. Fox opened its presentation on Thursday with the 90s rapper-turned-reality-star performing “Ice Age Baby.” The audience whistled, whooped, and applauded without abandon—a stark contrast to the silence granted to most other presenters.