To me this suggests that theater’s are at least partially incorrectly pricing things which explains why they are struggling.
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.
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.
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.