Doesn't sound like a bad thing, IMHO.

> tipping large sums of money

This would kind of suck, given the stupidity of current North American tipping norms. But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm. It'd be like watching a movie about monarchy, as the result of the audience holding a democratic vote on what movie to watch.

To be clear, it's a "different tipping paradigm" because of these properties:

• tipping would be entirely optional, in a selfish-pragmatist sense: there's no way in which a lack of tipping would get you blackballed from the theatre or even given a bad look, because the tips don't go to the theatre or its employees;

• you'd be tipping a collective of unseen workers far away who produced the experience a while ago, rather than tipping an individual close-by who did the work just now;

• there would be no possibility for tipping to get you individually a better quality of service, because your tip would be anonymized through the hub-and-spoke (studio-theatre-audience) delivery model. The studio would just see a pile of tip money, at best traced back to particular theatres.

Really, it's more equivalent to how film-festivals ask for donations; but they'd be asking for donations on behalf of the movie maker, rather than for themselves.

> targeted at rich people who have the money to give large tips

This is true, but 1. I'm not sure it's worse than whatever kind of targeting we have right now given the system's current inventives (which would be... cinematic populism?); and 2. this would put film in line with most of the arts, which generally run off of commissions/patronage.

Society doesn't generally outright reject the output of those fields of endeavor, despite their being mostly tuned to the tastes of their (rich) clients/patrons.

(Society does feel more "detached" from such works, though; there's a lot of "I don't get it" in art galleries, mainly because many works were created to be understood mostly by the patron and the social-milieu of people they showed it to, rather than by any passerby.)