It's easy to see it push $45-50 per person pretty quickly with kids.
What's the alternative?
Where I live now it's illegal for cinemas to stop you from bringing food in, so I occasionally might bring my own snack, but that might be like one out ten times. Mostly just watch the movie and eat before or after. (Spain if you want to know)
You could maybe get some sweets or chips or peanuts or similar (small snacks) but not the giant popcorn or sandwiches/hotdogs/etc., but the general idea was to go out and have (say) a pizza and a beer and later go to the cinema or - more seldom - go to the cinema and later go to the pizzeria or restaurant.
I always thought that the eating and drinking in the cinema was a US only thing, France and Germany (AFAICR) had also none of that years ago, but that maybe has changed.
Curious if in other EU countries it has ever been a thing.
In Spain you usually just buy the stuff, then go to the theater though, after some legal kerfuffles the current state of things is that an establishment can't sell you chips AND prevent you take your own chips, so we are free from absurd prices. I'm not sure that's the norm elsewhere.
We even snuck in things like burritos and tacos.
I imagine even mega chains charging literally up to 10x our ticket prices couldn't survive on tickets alone, the distributors still take the majority of admission, as I understood it.
There was a fair amount of distributor-driven quirks/'politics' that to a customer is a weird cinema decision - something else I recall is having to show a certain film, or for a certain length of time, even if it's not selling ('why don't they just stop showing it') under threat of not getting the upcoming blockbuster that definitely will. Sometimes it wasn't even that it wasn't doing well, manager would know in advance (by local demographics) that a film wouldn't do at all well, but basically not have a choice.
I feel somehow icky paying upwards or five or ten times the cost for something I don't really need. But that's just an internalized habit from growing up in a frugal household. I wish there was a more "honest" way for theaters to work.
This is why I buy at the concessions stand. I know that the theater itself makes almost nothing from the ticket sale.
If we're taking the kids though I consider it the cost of seeing the latest Marvel movie etc on day 1. If I keep a kids pack of popcorn and Icees on their lap, I know they will sit there and keep quiet instead of dancing in the aisle. Of course I bring candy in my wife's purse as well, I'm not the kind of monster who pays $7 for Red Vines.