As a popular leisure activity, complaining about the awfulness of movie theatres may have surpassed actual movie attendance. The noise! The cellphones! The prices of tickets and popcorn!
The year 2010 brought us the highest movie ticket prices so far, up 5 per cent from the previous year. The average ticket last year cost about $7.89 U.S., including age discounts and regional variations. In Canada, which is part of the U.S. domestic movie market, adult general admission prices are between $10 and $13.
Are things out of control? In a blog item this past Tuesday that The Hollywood Reporter picked up, BTIG media investment analyst Richard Greenfield chastised David Ownby, the chief financial officer of the United States' biggest theatre chain, Regal Entertainment Group. Ownby boasted about theatre's big profit margins: A $6 bucket of popcorn cost 15 to 20 cents to produce and 3-D films have allowed the chain to charge an average of $3.50 premiums a ticket, on a low cost of only $4,000 per screen.
Greenfield wrote that exhibitors' strategy of "raising ticket prices through 3-D premiums and pushing concession pricing as far as humanly possible" was dangerous, and exhibitors should be less concerned with maximizing profits than increasing customer satisfaction.
Though it's probably not a popular view, it's possible that current theatrical pricing, more popularly known as gouging, really is about customer satisfaction.
Proposition 1: Movies are cheap entertainment. When adjusted for inflation, the tickets haven't gone up that much: The $1.55 cost of a ticket in 1970 would be $8.71 today. Compared to visits to sports events, theme parks and rock concerts, movies are a bargain. A family of four can still go to the cinema for less than $50. An NHL game would likely be four times as much. The cost of a rock concert last year averaged $61 per ticket.
Proposition 2: High-price popcorn is the movie-lover's friend. That's not to say you should actually eat the stuff, just recognize that the money theatres make on concessions allows them to keep your ticket cost as low as it is. Theatres and studio distributors split the revenue of a movie ticket, with the studio getting most of the money at the beginning. With popcorn sales, the whole revenue belongs to the theatre. Naturally theatres want more people coming in at lower prices and spending more on concessions.
Proposition 3: Different prices for different movies makes sense. The extra cost offends our sense of order as much as our wallets. We're accustomed to paying the same price for a movie ticket, whether a movie costs $30,000 or $300-million to produce. But the convention of uniform movie pricing, which has only existed since about 1970, is an economic antique. "Uniform systems seem fair because of the system's regularity, not because of any intrinsic justice," argued economists Barak Orbach and Liran Einav in a 2007 study of the move ticket prices.
Canadian and American attendance fell 5 per cent last year and movie theatres are struggling to keep their revenues up. Studios, who make the films, are not always their allies: The studios are making fewer films while pushing ahead on a plan to release video-on-demand films eight weeks after the theatrical release, cutting into theatres' potential profits. For a lot of people, paying an estimated $20-$25 to watch a recent movie at home with friends or family will be an attractive alternative to going out. That's why theatres have to keep trying ideas, even ones that annoy us, just to survive.
OPENING NEXT WEEK
Amazon Falls In Vancouver writer-director Katrin Bowen`s debut feature, an aging B-movie actress (April Telek) refuses to give up on the Hollywood dream.
Cosmonaut In this Italian coming-of-age story set in 1963, 15-year-old Luciana has a crush on the leader of her Young Communist group and is obsessed with Russian space missions.
Kill the Irishman The true story of Irish mobster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) and his battle with the Italian Mafia in Cleveland in the 1970s, with Christopher Walken and Vincent D'Onofrio
The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman In this Chinese action-comedy, a group of misfits become mixed up in the struggle to own a deadly kitchen cleaver made from the top five swords of the martial arts world.
I Saw the Devil When his pregnant wife is killed, a secret agent seeks bloody vengeance in this thriller from Korean director Kim Jee-Woon.
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte's story of a governess who discovers her employer's secret stars Mia Wasikowska, with Michael Fassbender as Rochester.
Limitless Bradley Cooper plays a copywriter who discovers a drug which gives him superhuman abilities. With Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish and Anna Friel
The Lincoln Lawyer In this adaptation of Michael Connelly`s novel, Matthew McConaughey plays a Los Angeles criminal defence attorney who operates out of the back of his Lincoln sedan. With Ryan Phillipe and Marisa Tomei.
Paul Director Greg Mottola ( Adventureland) directs Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in a comedy about Brits on a road trip who pick up an alien hitchhiker.
When We Leave A young woman of Turkish descent fights for independence from her traditional family.
The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom Director-writer Tara John`s Manitoba-set coming-of-age comedy about an 11-year-old girl (Julia Stone) who is determined to learn about her origins.
Liam Lacey