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)