Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
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On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to care enough about these topics. Instead the latest superhero movie is next door packed to the brim and is so loud it rattles the walls to the room playing my quiet documentary with only me sitting inside watching it. :/
Rarely are these things documented in the moment and human memory is fickle even when we think we recall something accurately. It may seem like I’m taking y’all too literally or being nitpicky but I’m just illustrating one component. These kinds of situations happen across every “fact” of the story, which is almost always a movie based on a written account that came after, often written by someone who wasn’t even involved in the subject matter. Degrees of separation, lack of information, some or all people involved may be dead, etc.
Take it as entertainment, and nothing more. For example, Remember the Titans, we were shown it in school over and over. There was no racial component in real life. The Blind Side is egregious in its portrayals. Pursuit of Happyness also.
If instead we make a video that conveys the same information; it has to "make up" details (we have to cast the actors, which will be of a certain age, sex, race, etc; we have to give them lines, etc; and so on) that may colour the implications - and you, as a viewer, have no easy way to determine what is essential and what is accidental.
Are you saying that no movies should be allowed to claim they are trying to tell a true story, and that documentaries aren’t neutral/accurate enough and are therefore invalid? I’m just trying to figure out the scope of your claim and implications here so I get that could be off base.
Might be simpler to ask: What would you consider a good documentary? What would you consider a movie that is based on a true story and does an accurate-enough job? What do consider or use as a metric when deciding these works are good or accurate?
No. Freedom of speech and all that, unless it was a libel/slander thing.
>and that documentaries aren’t neutral/accurate enough and are therefore invalid?
Sufficient documentaries have been sufficiently inaccurate such that it behooves me to consider them all fictional.
>What would you consider a good documentary? What would you consider a movie that is based on a true story and does an accurate-enough job? What do consider or use as a metric when deciding these works are good or accurate?
I don't know off the top of my head, I would have to do research. But that's the point, if I am doing research, I might as well read books/journals/websites/articles with source information.
>I think pretty much all audiences know there is a degree of fiction to any of these works and that you have to take various work with different sized grains of salt.
I don't know about that. For example, Carol Haskins received a large amount of hate and death threats from the way Tiger King was edited. And people like to "know" things, anything that confirms their biases or makes them feel like they are smarter, they are going to latch onto.
I think the rule of thumb should be videos should be assumed to be fictional unless rigorously vetted, or at least that is what serves my purpose for having the most accurate model of the events. The objective is not to educate the viewer, it is to entertain the viewer.
I guess I’ll ask this then: what would a documentary have to do to be considered accurate enough for you that it can be used to educate? I just don’t really know where the lines are for you it all feels rather vague. If we’re demanding objectivity and accuracy, then there needs to be some clear metric(s) otherwise no one can say they are or aren’t.
Obviously written works do not present more information, but they can provide only the known information (which I guess a documentary composed of the actual recordings and interviews of the events can provide). And obviously written stuff can also be fabricated and blah blah, but assuming all of that, I just presume the fidelity of a video re-creation of an event is less than that of a written one.
One example I just thought of that led me to this assumption of discounting all videos is the way Captain Phillips is portrayed. The recent movie Blackberry is also highly fictional.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/
I know these aren't documentaries per se, but they all require digging to get to the truth v fiction parts, so why bother digging? If I want to be entertained, I watch the video. If I want to be educated, I look up written sources I think might be credible.
I still don’t understand what the bar is or what you consider necessary for something to be deemed “accurate.” Writing as a medium has all of the same pitfalls that video does and then some. This feels very vibes-based.
What’s an example of a written text that you would say is accurate in a way that a documentary can’t be? Do you consider any media of any kind to be factual or accurate in any way? I’m just not sure how one can go about life considering all forms of media inherently deceptive to the point where nothing can be treated as anything more than mere entertainment.
It isn't, which is why I specified:
>(which I guess a documentary composed of the actual recordings and interviews of the events can provide)
>I still don’t understand what the bar is or what you consider necessary for something to be deemed “accurate.”
The bar is lack of dramatization. I gave multitudes of examples of videos based on various real life happenings, but they don't do a good job representing actual happenings. The "based on" is strictly a marketing term, but no one should be under the impression they are getting any actual data from watching it, hence it is entertainment.
A documentary with various interviews, actual footage, blah blah is of course better, but many documentaries include dramatizations, and are edited to have "twists and turns" in the story to captivate the viewer. A documentary that sticks only to the known facts is probably pretty dry and boring (although I am sure they exist). There are myriad "true" crime documentaries (including podcasts) that leave out key details about the case because including them would make the story boring.
However, I am sure there are far more accurate documentaries, and I have heard this is one of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Zachary:_A_Letter_to_a_So...
But back to the point, broadly speaking, probability wise, if I sit down and some video media says it is "based on" or it is a "documentary", I would be wise to be skeptical, and I guess that goes for the written word these days too.
My point is that they don’t and can’t, objectivity is a myth. You and I (and everyone) are literally incapable of being truly objective. So the only conclusion i see is you don’t think any media is able to inform or educate. If you do, then you need an actual bar beyond “must be objective.”
“Dramatization” is just one tool some documentaries, not all, lean on and isn’t well defined. Are you talking about dramatic reenactments? Or introducing any drama of any kind? Isn’t drama sometimes just inherent to the subject?
Meanwhile, people who saw the movie and found it decently engaging are busy convincing themselves that it was 99% true. And 99% of 'em will never bother to check.
The term to describe my "99%" isn't "dumb". It's "don't care".
Of course, if I'm going to talk about something I know deeply, I'm almost certainly going to begin with "this is all incorrect in the details, but correct in general" or similar.
For those sufficiently pedantic, true. OTOH, there's a rather wide spectrum in how well (say) Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Ken Burns's The Civil War, and McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom portray the U.S. Civil War.
If you apply your logic to all political documentaries then you're just going to end up not watching anything.
I was able to experience the movie in a very special way. In New York BAM Rose Cinemas was running a special 35mm press of the film one week before its official debut. Edgar Wright did a red eye run debuting the film in London and then getting on a plane to rush to New York where he arrived just in time for the credits. Having him walk down the steps and sitting right in front of me for Q&A was a amazing experience. Its really a shame the movie flopped even with the extra slack it was given due to debuting during COVID. His most recent film did pretty bad as well. I'm bummed as he is my favorite director. :/
Surely you mean "couldn't care less"?
I'm afraid you are making less and less sense.
Of course you can still do that with the surviving "all you can eat" plans, but they're way more expensive and aren't quite as generous.
Unlimited movies and they ate the entire cost? They didn't arrange any special deals or anything - they just paid the full price of the movie. It was insane.
So (in theory) it's a "win win" if they get everyone onboard - the theater gets to sell popcorn, the movie studio gets a buck or two instead of nothing, and movie pass collects the subscription.
However, it needs them all to agree that the $15 ticket for "the empty theater" is really only worth $1 - which would go to the movie studio. That part never happened.
AMC is the dumbest company (or more specifically, its CEO Adam Aron is the dumbest executive). MoviePass came in out of nowhere and became the largest purchaser of movie tickets... millions every week. And AMC actively fought against them, refused to even let them buy tickets at full price, and led the charge to drive them out of business. For what alternative? Mostly, nothing but empty seats.
AMC's stock price is $1.59 as I write this vs $50-70 while MoviePass was peaking around 2018. AMC had to do a 10-to-1 reverse stock split to avoid being delisted, they may need to do another one. They even got a brief "meme stock" spike over $250 and managed to do absolutely nothing productive (except pay the CEO more) with this new capital access.
The plan was that as you went to movies, you probably also went out to eat at a nearby restaurant, maybe stopped and had a drink, took transit to get there, etc. If they could hoover up all of that location- and merchant-tagged data, they could build a valuable profile for marketing.
Also, they believed that after you subscribed and gorged yourself on tons of movies for a couple months, the novelty would wear off and you'd revert to a more typical couple movies a month.
So if they could break even or make a small profit on the subscription, the data is where all the gold would be.
The problem was that they did not have the technology to gather all this info, not to mention the privacy/regulatory restrictions around essentially tracking your every movement and spend through a phone app.
There were a lot of other sketchy things about the company as well. Wall Street Millennial (a wonderfully entertaining channel) did a video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4vmCKIXOyw
Not only that, but the bulk of the ticket charge goes to the distributer. Why NOT offer MoviePass screenings with the option to see a couple movies a week... it's the concessions that make you the money.. more butts in seats, more concessions.
Of course, many now have pretty acceptable home theater experiences... though I'd say more have large screens and sub-par audio. That changes the dynamics a lot with streaming options what they are. I don't know what the future of movie theaters is... luxury/dinner theaters are a pretty nice option, but when food costs in general are going through the roof it becomes something you just don't do as much. I mean, how much is a large popcorn and two drinks at this point? Let alone a mid-level pub meal at theater upcharge.
Depending on the theater's manager, they'll either want someone to guarantee a minimum or to have a single fee paid up front.
There's nothing quite like knowing that everyone in the theater is a friend.
That said, you're 100% right about making an offer. Most theaters have underutilized screening rooms, and managers have the ability to rent for private events. I've done this a few times. The rental rate tends to be about 10-15x the price of a single ticket (in my experience).
Either it's big enough to warrant a massive video and sound system (because I have pretty great ones at home already, so it has to be extravagant), or it has to be something I've heard about and want to see so much that we don't really care about the best, we just want to go. Otherwise, why mess around with high prices and rude people?
I hate to say it, but I think most theaters are gonna die.
That said, it's also nice sometimes catching a mostly empty 2pm showing of something and getting the perfect seat without distractions... Especially considering if I turn up the volume to get the appropriate experience at home I get yelled at.
I lost my favorite theater in the early 2020s and then its sibling, and last locally-owned and operated theater, to a landlord screwing with rents to try to attract an inner-city Publix. (A deal which still may not actually happen.)
That leaves the AMC as the last regularly attended theater of my high school and college days still standing.
A newer, more popular Cinemark is in the city's biggest mall. I still remember when mall theaters were the worst/cheapest/smallest places. This has flipped now that most of what's left of the malls are the new theater/Dave & Busters at the one mall or the Top Golf/Puttshack at the other mall with the rest of the malls seeming now just weird appendixes to the new attractions. Meanwhile, I don't want to deal with Mall Traffic, which is still a thing in these flipped malls, I don't entirely know why.
Most of the rest of the most popular theaters all wound up in the Exurbs, two beltways away from the city's downtown, presumably due to cheaper land, and I don't want to commute that far to regularly watch movies.
Yeah, mall theaters are just kind of hellish... mostly because of the parking/organization... I know why they're laid out how they are, just really wish they'd switch it up to make the theater easier to access if that's all you want.
I'm glad I was in a full house for Avengers: Endgame, for example. I don't know how much it mattered, OTOH, for Oppenheimer, or Hail Mary.
When I went to see Project Hail Mary, I enjoyed the full theater, when I went to watch the new Jurassic World movie in an empty theater I was bored out of my mind, on the other hand I've seen many anime movies in empty theaters where I absolutely loved having a quiet theater entirely to myself.
On the European Cinema network [0], reserved seats is a long gone concept.
So not always a given that seats can be reserved online for cinema, depends on ones location.
I guess it depends then.
With new ticketing systems and online booking being introduced I think there has been a shift towards assigned seating. I remember the first time I was in a Dresden European Network cinema (Schauburg in 2015, that’s the oldest cinema in Dresden, 1927) and there either being no assigned seating or a seat printed on the ticket that no one cared about. We also weren’t asked where we wanted to sit. That has changed with a new ticketing system and now we are always asked about where we want to sit.
I think these ticketing systems come with assigned seating and that’s also a factor in assigned seating being introduced.
Notably, the one cinema that doesn’t have assigned seating also doesn’t offer online booking or reservations at all.
The four big multiplex cinemas in the city have assigned seating and do price discrimination based on where you sit – so it’s taken somewhat more seriously there.
So, yeah, my guess would be that the role online ticketing and the respective software/service/devices those cinemas use for that do all play a role in what role assigned seating plays and those can also trigger a cultural shift from sit where you want to assigned seating. (I have vivid childhood memories of my hometown long before online booking with price discrimination sections but no assigned seating in cinemas.)
So yea, location dependent.
But, I love the idea of a theater almost entirely to myself.
And the online process shows you which seats are already filled and I base my decision on that when there is assigned seating. One thing peculiar is that the theatres are not often as filled as the seat map shows, makes me think that an even newer generation of the movie ticket subscribers (AMC A-List) are reserving seats and changing plans
And if I even accept this, the people in the choice seats invariably show up right when all the trailers are wrapping up.
so - people buy tickets ahead of time, and it might be the only way to watch it from a reasonable seat.
This probably doesn't apply to off-hours like tuesday afternoon or whatever.
My experience, being discussed in another thread, is that only big commercial multiplex do it, many small cinemas with more alternative content, usually don't do assigned seats, only ticket reservations.
Personally, I like being able to select the exact seats and pre-order popcorn and soda and just have it show up to me right as the trailers end.
Then you have smaller cinemas with indie movies, european movie festival rotation, etc, and many of those in at least 4 or 5 countries in Europe I can confirm do NOT have assigned sitting.
Even our small independent theater in town has reserved seats, some of which are couches.
Maybe in fancy theaters, but in most places it started during covid (and just never stopped)
Neither of those is remarkable now, but they were both unheard-of then.
My reference point for movie theatres is the late 90s/early 2000s so maybe I'll have to give them another try.
The "box office" is not even really a thing anymore at most theaters. And the single person you talk to inside that is the "box office" just uses the same system you can reserve seats yourself on your own time?
Pretty much every theater is reserved seating these days. Why would I risk showing up last minute on a whim and end up in a horrible seat near the front of the screen?
Occasionally I have a "private screening" where I'm the only one in the auditorium. The most recent example was "The Mummy". I hadn't fully thought throught the implications of watching a horror movie alone in the middle of a darkened 65-seat auditorium!
There's another town a few miles away where a similar cinema has both assigned seating and 20 minutes of adverts before the movie.
Exactly the same as it's always been, and it works beautifully. I can't imagine a reason to mess with it.
I’m old and have always pre-purchased tickets, even in the 90s, as that’s the way to get better seats.
In Switzerland the seats have always been numbered and even if the cinema is empty people wouldn't dare move into another seat. People do show up right before the film starts and try to avoid the ads. Some also hang in the lobby until the film actually starts.
That said, for "general admission" theaters, if you want to get good seats, you'd have to show up early and waste time watching all those trailers.
The theaters were never full. So it was basically just like watching a movie in your own living room. Yeah, except maybe for the handful of strangers that were there to watch with you.
Cons: have to watch arthouse.
Meanwhile if I watch at home then there's half a century of classics that I haven't gotten around to watching yet.
it's especially cool as someone who's young and wasn't even born when some of these movies initially came to cinemas.
at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.
When you grow up it's not only nostalgia, but the feeling that most of the ideas are really not new. I remember watching 'You Were Never Really Here', that had a huge hype behind it, and thinking "I have seen this same exact movie a hundred of times".
+1, yes! watched it for the first time a couple of years ago after hearing about it and deciding to ethically download it, since then i've watched it a couple of times and at the start of this year even bought a Blu-Ray Player and a 4k Ultra HD copy* just because I wanted a physical copy to put on a shelf and watch it in an optimal quality. and as mentioned i'll go watch it in a cinema in a couple of months.
i also created a letterboxd account this year to log every movie i've ever seen. what's weird is that i've logged over 400 movies, but if i look at a graph of the years they were realeased in it's almost a perfect bell curve with the top being between 2006 - 2010.
*in these last couple months i started buying used blu-rays and DVDs and now got about 70 movies. guess this is my form of nostalgia. others got vynils, i got movies. physical media just feels different than downloaded movies. cover art, bonus material, DVD menues with soundtracks. love it...
There are literally thousands of good movies released between ~1890 and last year.
It’s improbable more than a hundred or so will come out this year that’re worth your time, and they’ll be harder to sort from the junk this close to release.
If anything, it’s amazing new movies have as large an audience as they do.
kind of how some movies like The Big Lebowski were considered flops but nowadays are cherished cult classics.
Most movies are decently budgeted and so at least meet some minimum bar for quality - so cult classics can arise time and time again. There are movies in theaters right now that will be the cult classics of the 2050s.
I am among them. I make no attempt to say they’re high concept or anything, but I leave feeling good for awhile and that’s enough for me
So maybe I want to watch some capeshit today, but I don't want it to be exactly the same as the ones I've watched before. Many people feel this way, and the market provides.
It sometimes feels wrong to only pay €25 after watching so many movies. So I make up for it by buying things from the cinemas.
Back in the heyday, I used to work in a startup devoted to the cinema world, where with one app you could buy tickets for all cinemas - even those that did not "officially" support it.
Among them were arthouse theaters in Hamburg, which I often used for testing, as most of the time reserving a few seats would not matter as they would be empty, at least during the day. Some of them had projections of old movies, and I was like "if I lived there, I'd go every day".
Ironically, now I live between 2 art cinemas in my city and rarely go to any of them :)
but you could always be sure that the old lady loudly crunching on every.single.crisp. was there in the showing as well
We got to small talk and the lady mentioned she had once been the only customer for a showing and told the projectionist that she didn’t want to be a bother and could come back and another day.
The projectionist had apparently replied that it was no bother - they would roll the movie even if no one showed up!
Not to mention that film rolls do wear out overtime.
The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copying happening.
This was late 200x-ish, before digital protection became widespread iirc.
Maybe. Depends.
I’m sure I’ve heard of the low cost carriers cancelling flights that are under-sold at the last minute.
Would make sense if the destination has fewer tickets sold from there.
They tried to sit near me and be friendly, but I was too depressed to engage. Missed opportunity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...
and
"He said, 'I can’t get off the plane. I have to get home. I'm a doctor. I have to get to the hospital in the morning.'" Myers stated that her response was not appropriate: "She said, 'Well, then I'll just have to call the police and have you escorted off the plane.'
Savage.
I'm unsure exactly how the deals with local businesses running ads before the movies are set up, but I could imagine that you're supposed to be running the ads an agreed upon number of times, regardless of ticket sales.
Sometimes in the daytime we would get retirees who would watch a movie and basically loiter around, and occasionally ask if they could catch the end of a different movie running in an empty hall. You'd sometimes let a regular crash an empty screening like this if they bought an extra snack or coffee for it or something.
I had to go to the cinema 3 times, because they would not do a projection for less than 5 people.
Which in turn is how much the studios and distributors pay to make/market the film?
Which is in turn driven by costs...
Which are basically large bets on if a piece of art will have mass appeal.
Now, in reality there are second-hand effects, of course - like people getting adjusted to the below-cost ticket prices and being even less incentivized to buy at the normal price.
If it is free to show the movie then there is no penalty to running extra sessions. If it isn't free, someone is being paid. If that is a different someone to where ticket money goes they care more about sessions than viewings.
If you lower the price too much, you get a different sort of clientele. The sort of person who wrecks the place and annoys all the other patrons nearby.
Then the cleanup costs a lot. Often more than the amount of revenue collected on the room.
It absolutely makes more sense to keep the hotel room empty than to lower the price to keep it fully occupied.
Apparently the deal back then was that theatres had to buy films in packages. If you wanted the latest blockbuster, you had to buy a bunch of terrible dross, and commit to showing it X times.
Theaters are struggling because they need the working class to attend, and the working class has no money. This is true for any non-essential business that depends on 90% of the people.
To find new ways of extract money may help a little, but in the end the basic economics do not add up.
You want prices set such that it’s almost but not quite at capacity. This gives you slack to accept stragglers while optimizing your profit on the price demand curve.
This is why they always gravitate to "$5 before noon/4pm" or "$5 Tuesdays" or similar things that are easy to remember.
I'm waiting for them to have the best seats in the house be the large armchairs for $20, and the rest of the shitseats be normal stadium seating for $5.
1. New releases get on stream within weeks to couple of months. 2. Lots of new movies are supposed to be a TV movie and not a theater release (subjective)
I go to the movies way more than needed and I stopped blindly going to the movies and started to check reviews before because so many movies were really bad which is something I very rarely have experienced in the past (even when I had unlimited passes and seeing more than 1 movies per week)
I wonder if they even bother turning the projector on if they sold no tickets? How much energy does the bulb use compared to ticket price?
One or two exceptions - Project Hail Mary, for example.
But the decline of Marvel, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises has been stark.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker has some great commentary on the problem.
Also, a number of other factors:
* massive TVs are cheap now
* people behave disrespectfully in cinemas
* cinema tickets are now unaffordable for the low end of the market
* the experience hasn't modernised and become luxy enough to retain the high end of the market
* streaming services have high budgets nowI'll be curious to see if others chime in.
This was my first thought upon seeing the OP as well. I haven't been to a theater in years, and part of the problem is I don't know what I'd go there to watch.
I've been pretty explicitly told that Hollywood does not want to sell to me or my demographic by this point, and it's also pretty evident in the media that is being produced.
And the media I do consume, I don't really feel a need to see in theaters.
I feel bad, because I have many fond memories of going to the theater as a kid with my parents. With the way things are going, they may be long gone before I ever get a chance to replicate that experience for a family of my own.
Sadly you're right. At times like this I wish Silicon Valley was in Texas or Florida rather than one of the most leftwing / collectivist states in America.
Fancier theaters like the Alamo draft house seem to be trying to complete with watching at home in some ways, but for the most part theaters seem to just be doubling down on the parts if the experience that were already decisive- namely getting louder and adding bigger screens. That might tempt the people who already like what theaters have to offer into going slightly more often, but I think it’s made even more people stop going at all.
Madame web was a great example, it was in theaters for months, and being heavily advertised, and no one was going. At the time I thought it was Sony trying to ruin Marvel's reputation, but it makes more sense that they needed a loss on the books, and most of the money they spent went to companies they had a piece of.
Meanwhile, you have movies that are in and out in a single weekend that go on to become cult classics because they never had a chance.
(E.g., you may find the new Dune films too violent, but they were great. And the moral is not very subtle in them. :)
If the theater is full of people talking during the movie or lighting the place up while they’re on their phone (in either case ignoring the movie), then I’d rather be alone.
It seems like more times than not, this is the case.
Since most theatres have gone full digital, the "projector" won't show the film if there have been no tickets sold. That eliminated the game of buying one ticket and then sneaking in to see a few more movies.
Around here, films from Bollywood show in Telugu, Hindi, Gujarati languages. There are family films in Spanish (those aren’t bad dubs, but parallel scripts and A-list voice actors.) Want to watch a Studio Ghibli film? Here’s the timetable for dubbed; here’s a timetable for subtitles!
There are live video-game tournaments. There are premieres for live operas and symphony orchestra performances that are simulcast around a region.
There are Christian groups who go in to support a film, and they can turn those into fundraisers and evangelization activity.
The auditoriums can be rented out for special events. Big birthday, Kindergarten graduation, Quinceañeras, etc. They will support teleconferencing and businesses can hold seminars or all-hands meetings there.
I suppose that all of these schemes were harmed by the pandemic and lockdowns, but the advertising is still there, and the Hindus are still showing up on public transit.
Its the norm and its probably why their stock is trading at $1.45 as of this writing.
Its a dead (not dying, dead) entertainment option. When you are competing for the same 24 hrs in a day with TV, Youtube, Gaming, Streaming, TikTok, Instagram and many others the theater is bottom of the barrel for young people today.
And don't tell me its because people are disrespectful or the commercials are too long. These are a problem but Alamo Drafthouse tried to tackle this and they ended up in bankruptcy. AMC would also be bankrupt today but it's saving grace was the meme stock frenzy they had a few years back. Probably bought them a few more years but that ride might be coming to an end.
Currently they fill the rooms for the pop movies like old established franchises but that only comes along every couple weeks at the most and the rest of the time the place is not really busy. This is a bit different in the big cities but AMC has overextended themselves with too many locations in the rural and suburban US.
...Also this app is not displaying accurate data (I assume they are pulling from AMC's API). My local theater is listing no results and I cross checked and there are movies currently listed that have 0 seats booked so the app is counting incorrectly for at least one theater.
EDIT: After I wrote this, the site auto updated with new data. Now I see some screenings but it is still inaccurate because it is still missing movies from that theater...maybe they are scraping instead of using the API? This is a simple problem if using the API (I wrote my own home cooked app): just iterate through all theater ids, find the ones with 0 bookings and display that list.
It's just dead in its current form, you're right about that. To make it work they need to reinvent themselves. But it's hard.
They are a US national chain and they don't run "commercials" just lots of trailers. They have recently announced that they have extended the trailer runtime from 20-25 mins to 35-40 mins. While this is frustrating they always indicate in the app which movies have the trailers (most do) and the approx length. As a result, patron who want to skip the trailers use the app for guidance and just arrive +35 mins after the showtime. Example: https://i.imgur.com/bsVf6AE.png
Given this system, I dont think AMC has really lost patrons because of the ads since everyone who hates them know exactly how long to delay their entrance to the movie room. It really is the other factor I mentioned (they are not compelling enough most of the time vs other entertainment).
One more aspect I forgot to mention is concession prices. Small popcorn is ~10$, small drink is ~7$ so ~17$ for basic concessions and that does not include ticket price ranging between 5$ on Tuesday special deals for standard definition all the way to $27.99+ for premium screen. If you are going to the movies you might as well watch it on their best screen. It gets expensive if you are bringing family. The reason for this pricing is the studio. They actually take a majority of the ticket revenue and they refuse to lower their percentage of ticket prices on the marquee titles (and also require 2 week minimum contracts in the premium screens even if the movie is a stinker)
The theaters are essentially just popcorn/soda vendors who just happen to show movies on the side.
AMC is also interesting because even in the "real" trailer period they have a long ad for AMC itself but also for Coke, then another for themselves telling you to sign up for the loyalty programs, then another for themselves with Nicole Kidman in the theater with her suit with the silver pinstripes. A little thing for the theater is normal but they're going way overboard with it and it's hard to believe it's really effective.
For $27.99 I can usually get MLB tickets people are dumping last minute (face value starts a few dollars higher) and can always get AAA baseball tickets for less than that.
That dynamism to the pricing helps a lot of people get into the door to those events and I'm sure it helps them milk additional profit out of very interesting games.
I know you say it's the studios setting the price. Why do they seem indifferent to the impending bankruptcy of theaters?
This is partly explained by Matt Damon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6K2IxC9O8
>I know you say it's the studios setting the price. Why do they seem indifferent to the impending bankruptcy of theaters?
They are pushing their streaming platforms and using the content as just a hook for other more lucrative sources of revenue(ie. Disney and theme parks). Do they really need the theaters now that people are hooked on streaming?
The last few movies I’ve seen in theaters have not been that. Two of the last 3 movies I’ve seen had audio mixing problems, and dialogue was inaudible in some scenes. (I heard this got fixed later for one of the movies) In all of them, I could hear bass from the adjacent theaters in some scenes. In the last two movies I went to see, both had someone in the audience bring an intermittently crying baby to the movie.
Im done with watching movies in theaters. It’s a better experience to watch at home, with headphones, a blanket, and the ability to pause for bathroom breaks.
Unfortunately since they already filed for bankruptcy a few years back they have had to cut costs and so their system for ordering food replaced (from pen and paper collected and an usher quietly brings you your food to QR code with...a cellphone) people are recently concerned that this has reduced their legendary quality. They still take audio and picture quality very seriously in my experience.
Also where are you located? LA and NYC have legendary theaters that are truly a special treat. Its harder to replicate that in various states but there are still some states trying (ex. NJ being the actual birthplace of the American film industry has a few excellent theaters scattered throughout that dont tolerate poor quality/talkers)
If your story is from AMC theaters just know that you are visiting the Mcdonalds of movie theaters.
Very cool idea nonetheless.
It’s meant I can jump on re-runs etc I really care about (just saw Fight Club last week) - and get the specific seat location I prefer.
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Anyways, the point is that with the advent of big home TVs, streaming, I've virtually stopped going to movie theaters. The experience is always subpar every time I go due to eating noise and talking.
I think you're in the wrong "actually I prefer to be alone in social spaces" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007438
"As of May 3, 2026, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has grossed $403 million in the United States and Canada, and $495 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $897 million. Produced on a budget of $110 million, the film is currently the highest-grossing film of 2026 and the highest-grossing animated film of the year. The film also set the record for the biggest global opening at the box office in 2026, the only animated film franchise with two films opening to over $350 million globally, the fifth-biggest global opening for an animated film of all time, the second-biggest global opening for an Illumination film, the second-biggest opening for a film based on a video game, and the fourth-biggest Easter three-day opening of all time."
Almost $900 million gross against a cost of $110 million seems pretty good