Running a movie theater is more expensive than you can possibly imagine

This innovation eliminated the need for a projectionist to sit there and swap every 20min -- now a projectionist only had to touch the machinery once per showing rather than once per reel. It did add some labor Thursday nights as new films had to be spliced together and old ones broken up to be fed back into the can.

Thanks to this system a 12 screener could easily be operated by one teenager (me), and a twin theater didn't even need a dedicated projectionist-- just the manager popping up to lace up the film once per showing.

(Films still had the corner black dot cute though, I guess since some older theatres still had the then antique two projector system)

Thanks to startup timers, you didn't even need to be there exactly when it started, just sometime between the last showing and the next one -- but you did this at your peril, as jams and other glitches were most common at startup time, especially in the "brain" the clever device that allowed feeding the film from the inside of the input platter megareel to the outside of the output platter, this avoiding the need for rewinding you would have if you fed from outside to outside as with casette tapes.

All in all, my era's projectors were more even complex in the pursuit of saving labor costs.

I miss them. They were really cool machines.

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Movies are also located in metro areas so easier to get to, are more flexible with times and showing and overall a more comfortable experience especially with a family. I think $20 per person for an afternoon is still competitive as a leisure activity.

https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/00005E389E6B454C?brand=ny...

I don't think there's been anything showing though that I've wanted to see in a long time. Hollywood gets the blame for that.

Cost to see a movie is also a big issue.

It feels like the small theaters though are making a come back. I see plenty of "art house" theaters in Kansas City ... even a drive-in or two are appearing. These surely don't require the high-end playback equipment and tend to, IMHO, show better and more varied content.

Compared to those other things, sure. But if you consider that a lot of people go out to eat once a week and regularly spend far more than $20, then that $20 price tag is not so crazy. Part of the problem has been that a lot of movies released lately barely feel worth paying that much to see. The movies are just mediocre. When I see a good movie, though, I don't even think about how much it cost me to see it.

(Also, seeing a major league sports game for $15 is incredible. In my market, even at $20 movies are usually way cheaper than tickets to a sports game.)

They don't always have to compete. I rarely go see concerts, and I never go see sports, plays, or anything else really. But I go see movies from time to time. In that case there is no competition, at least not in similar activities.

I've stopped going to theaters because the cost/benefit analysis doesn't work out. I've got a long list of entertainment subscriptions that need to be paid each month, and honestly because today's movies aren't even worth a $5 ticket price. It feels as though they're too focused on technology and not enough on having a good story.

Same. Except it has nothing to do with theaters and everything to do with Hollywood and what's being released. The question becomes if Hollywood went back to the "old model", the model that saw less franchises and more comedy/drama/etc releases. Would it put butts in seats at the theater? Or has the latest generation/tv-tech obsoleted or diluted the experience thus shrinking the market going forward? (eg. like ecommerce did to shopping malls) Hard to know, but I do miss good unique movies.

Cinema just do not make sense unless you are a total fan of a given franchise. I wanted to see the new Top Gun, but I just waited until I could buy it digitally.

I can't wait until it becomes illegal to prioritize theaters - even if I have to pay the same for the ticket, the popcorn is a lot cheaper. That might make me watch more movies, but then again who knows.

With movies you’re just watching TV in the dark. Except the room is full of chavs and you have to pay £20 to watch an hour of unskippable ads.

The market is very small, compared to new releases. It's not hard for an existing theater to test this

The ones that work have some unique spin, e.g. the Wurlitzer organist plays an overture, or it's a singalong, or a cult classic for meetups like RHPS, etc

There's too much noise in the world for people to realize that 'Blade Runner' is playing at some random theatre.

What could work are co-markted events, for example, playing 'Blade Runner' leading up to a new release, and, if it's promoted broadly.

Or 'film festival' type things - I'm also certain there's a market for Venice/Cannes/Oscars content even in the theatre chains but it'd require marketing coordination.

Finally - price. It's too expensive relative to the 'almost big screen' we have at home, and the shift to 'Big CGI Only' for theatres is real. This is a whole other problem.

Have weeks centered around classic directors, stars or themes.

A week of Hitchcock films. Or Scorcese films. Or Classic Thrillers week. Or Murder Mystery week. etc.

Maybe the economics aren't there...? But many of the things I might want to see aren't on the streaming services I have anyway.

I expect that it's trivial to get a copy of a new release, and logistically challenging (and relatively expensive) to get a copy of an old one.

The main value in showing older content is variety. The more films you acquire to show, the more cost (plus overhead cost) you endure.

The studios that own the copyright to older films are the same corporations that want you showing their new lazy high-budget Action Hero XVII shit instead. They are likely to make restrictive deals with large theater chains (the ones with enough budget for quality projectors and seating) to set a schedule that aligns with box-store release dates.

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I have a purely 'ok' set up at home - more involved than some peoples, but nothing fancy:

In my living room I have a 120" diagonal screen (£30 from amazon) that we manually pull down the 12 to 24 times a year we use it. I have a schools short throw hd projector that was £70 delivered from ebay and then a set of £15 (2nd hand) pc speakers that are a sub and 2 speakers - all running off a 1st gen chromecast.

In my shed I have a marginally better set up of a mechanised screen (£70), then a more recent chromecast running to an hdmi splitter with optical audio out, which goes into a year 2007 5.1 sony amp (£30), with another schools projector (£130) - this set up came to about £250 all in.

If you have the room to keep the bits, I highly recommend a similar cheap set up - you can obviously spend loads more, but our cheapo living room set up does us proud and the audio is more than good enough for kids films. Means we enjoy loads of films as a family.

A big, splashy, large-scale action film? Yeah, it makes a difference to me. OTOH even apparently "thinky" films like the upcoming OPPENHEIMER are likely better in a more immersive situation.

But a smaller film like THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN? Not a factor. (But this also means I don't think you lose much watching it at home if you have a decent screen.)

Audio wise, you end up needing a lot more speakers and a more complex system to drive them. Some of the high-end cinemas put subwoofers under every butt; that's an option in a home theater too, but it's pretty excessive.

Oh wait, I forgot that movie studios routinely lie about revenues and margins. They are the OG's at hiding profits and engage in accounting shenanigans that make real estate tax lawyers blush.

Like what? Hollywood has been going downhill for years now — there are a few good movies a year, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be like. Just endless bland corporate written-by-committee superhero movies, prequels, sequels, reboots... maybe it's just time for the format to die.

I can only hope. The amount of absolute rubbish that has come out of Hollywood as of late is precisely the reason as to why I won't go to the cinema.

Film studios are too consolidated, which motivates them to prefer "safe bets" like the eternal continuation of Marvel IP. We should really have an order of magnitude more variety of film shown in theaters, but only a handful of corporations are equipped to create that content in the first place.

The walls of this prison are made of copyright. It's well past time to tear them down.

And not all movies need the advanced tech to tell a good story. It's been 25 years since Life Is Beautiful came out (my opinion: a masterpiece). I guess theaters can show the movie now if they get a digital transfer of it, but none of the extremely costly upgrades in the theaters will do anything to make the experience of watching that movie really any better. But I want to watch the next Life is Beautiful.

I feel like Life is Beautiful is art, and I'm asking to see an art exhibition at an amusement park. I have to think I'm the one with the misaligned expectations.

I live in New England, and I think that would cost about $50-60 at our local theater.

If you start from first principles and you compute it as "2.5 hours of entertainment in a climate controlled and comfortable environment with refreshments", it doesn't feel unreasonable to put it at 30$ (per person): that's in line with how much other comparable activities will set you back (escape rooms, paintball, whatever).

If you go from "the price has increased too much since I used to go there as a child/teen" then you are going to say that's way too much.

Some (most?) movies do feel better in a cinema than at home (at least to me). And this is without considering 3d, immersive sound/vibration or anything, just "vanilla" cinema. "Everything, everywhere, all at once" doesn't have the same ooomph on my tv.

I don't see them dying but they are endangered and niche. Bit like theatre.

This is also my perception, and a big reason why I stopped going to movie theatres (and concerts), but to be honest I don't know if it was really any better 20 years ago or if I'm just an old grumpy curmudgeon. I guess you need a time machine to do any proper research on this. I do know that "talking during theatre or movie screening" should absolutely be listed in the DSM under personality disorders.

If they rent, they will get squeezed quite hard.

I frankly think this point isn't considered seriously enough.

When you go to a sports event you see the sports instead of a screen.

When you go to a play, you see the play instead of a screen.

When you go the cinema, you see a screen. A bigger screen with a great sound system etc etc, sure, but a screen nonetheless.

Does it make sense to move 200 people to a big room with a big screen when each one of them have a small room with a small screen?

If for some bizarre reason cinemas were invented just now, would they find any market at all? It does sound like a bit of an absurd proposition to me.

Presumably the cost comes from the fact it has to be a secure toolchain from studio to projection. If it was just a random laptop then the full res copy could be syphoned off by a rogue employee.

Not defending the prices, just saying the studios have a strangle hold on that industry so you can't just solve problems in a simple cheap way.

Could be the case. However, one of the quirks about Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) is that they don’t use video codecs like H.264/AVC or H.265/HEVC. Instead, to maintain maximum quality, every single frame is individually compressed and stored with JPEG 2000, and they are played through like a slideshow, just at 24 frames per second. Needless to say this adds compute and especially storage concerns. Storing every frame of a movie individually quickly hits hundreds of gigabytes if not terabytes; and you need to decode and have every frame ready in less than 41 milliseconds, which is shockingly difficult even on high-end hardware. Even a modern Core i9 would have to be parallel and have multiple frames ready at a time because doing it a single frame at a time would be too slow (and thus, most projectors almost certainly use custom chips or FPGA-based decoders but that's really, really expensive). Do I need to mention read speeds and network traffic? If every frame is, say, just 5MB, that is over 960 Megabits per second, saturating a Gigabit link.

Another thing to consider is the multitude of speakers. Dolby Atmos is object-based, meaning there aren’t specific audio streams for specific speakers like in the past. Every speaker’s location is individually stored in the playback device varying between theaters, and the sound is calculated and mixed for that specific theater’s audio setup at the time the movie is played. When you are calculating audio in real-time for 30 or more speakers, the compute costs add up, potentially into custom hardware / FPGA territory. Also that "saturating a Gigabit connection" doesn't include the amount of data that the audio uses, and considering it's 24-bit PCM without any compression for dozens of streams for the objects, that's also pretty substantial. Just 2 streams of 16-bit PCM for ~70 minutes on a CD takes about 700MB.

So, just for one movie, with every frame taking 5MB (possibly more or less, we don't know how big they actually are) and audio taking whatever it takes, you would need a 2.5Gig Ethernet link to be safe, and storage that can deliver that (which is also why an external hard drive is out of the question for actual playback, only very recently do we have built-in NVMe SSDs that can deliver that kind of speed, but we still don't have any external SSDs that can deliver anywhere close; it just has to be RAID on multiple storage devices). Now consider what you need for a theater with 12-20 screens at a time. The storage amount and speed requirements is substantial. Now consider this has been standard for over a decade and think about how expensive this would've been to implement in, say, 2013. Oh, and that storage had better not fail, ever, or your entire theater is down, and there's a lot of refund requests and unsold tickets until it's running again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

the picture part is basically a collection of large JPEG 2000 images which are slower to unpack than JPEGs. It will take more than a Chromebook.

The prices they are quoting are pretty typical for rackmount industrial machines.

There's something to be said about going to a movie theater and being able to watch a movie distraction-free. No phones, no tablets, etc.

It was nice.