>...why would you see a movie with a bunch of shorts on it?

If you were long, among other reasons.

Yet I don't find their arguments particularly persuasive. You can apply this logic to other products to see why it fails.

Why would you buy a Tesla if there are so many people shorting them?

I could think of a couple ways that you could get people to see a dollar movie. What if you treat it like the dollar menu at McDonalds. The movies are shorter, say like 5-20 minutes but you get a combo of them so you fill up the same amount of time a normal movie would. So you see like 5 short movies for the same price as a normal feature.

I actually think that this might be viable with the rise of the semi-pro youtubers. The movie business already tracks dollars per minute as their metric for pricing content. Reducing length greatly reduces costs so more people could use that as a stepping stone for feature length films.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

Movie tastes are very niche and this is why Netflix makes so many weird/off stuff. But movies right now are like an "all or nothing" proposition so they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

But if you could do variable pricing, movies could stay in the theaters longer.

Also as recently as 15 years ago there were still "Dollar Theaters" that played past hits and it was totally a fun college-type thing to do to go with your buddies so that that one friend or friends would see it.

I think it would open up a whole new market of bargain-seeking/quirky behavior where the cheaper movies would be like a cult following type of deal.

I would go to see a movie for $1 without thinking much. If it's a good movie. If it's a bad one, I won't go seeing it even if I'm being paid (unless it's a lot of money). Now how to know if it's good or not is the question. But price is a rather bad signal for this - one has much better ones, like people involved in the production, trailers, reviews, recommendations of people you trust, etc. And it works reasonably well.