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There was actually a theatre chain in the UK that introduced a variable-pricing model: Easy Cinema. They avoided having to make subjective choices about which tickets are worth more by a simple, objective pricing model.

Basically, for any given screening, the first ten tickets they sold cost 40 cents. The next ten cost 95 cents. The next ten cost $1.50. (I'm completely making the numbers up off the top of my head here, just to give you an idea of the pricing mechanism.) And so on up until it topped out at whatever the maximum ticket price is.

Of course, if they did this in person, it would be a recipe for madness at the ticket window. So all sales were online. You bought a ticket from your computer, print it out, and then when you got to the theatre, you scanned it into a bar code reader. The place was virtually unstaffed--they didn't even sell refreshments, and you are encouraged to bring your own popcorn.

You will notice that the above is entirely in the past tense. EasyCinema opened in May 2003 and closed in May 2006, although the website survives as a DVD rental site. Apparently they just couldn't make enough to justify the rent on the building.

You can read more in this article, written when the cinema first opened. (The article is, unnecessarily and somewhat annoyingly, spread across 6 pages, but it's worth clicking all the way through if you're interested in this subject.)

Ah yes, enter the MPAA and UK equivalent that seem to have more greed than common sense.

Stelios came up with Easy Cinema (http://www.easycinema.com/ where you could watch a film for 50 pence (off peak, not likely a recent release either). Not sure it quite worked out as it maybe was planned, but his basic take was that he could strip out all of the snacks and drinks, replace them with vending machines, and have a skeleton staff running the place. If you want that kindly old dear showing you to your seat with that strange torch thing, you're out of luck.

In short, he was going to cut his costs to the knuckle so that ticket prices could get sensible. As someone who's widely acknowledged as being the catalyst for lowering the cost of air travel, he's got the credentials for doing it in cinema. As I say though, not sure it's quite panned out as broadly as it maybe was planned.

Personally, I think cinema is a bit old-hat. Home cinema is 'good enough' (and getting better/cheaper), so I can't see cinemas having anything you can't do elsewhere. Back in the 50s I'm sure cinema was the coolest thing ever, but not now. Imax may have the technology to give people a reason to leave their own homes, but lacking feature films has slowed them up.

The movie associations have had a good run of making money for old rope. They need to start innovating, or else the herd will just totter off elsewhere. They'll have to drop at least half of their greed to do it, so I can't see it happening any time soon.

The UK has a variable price movie theatre, run by the same Easy Group with the low cost airline :
http://www.easycinema.com/Enquiry/Enquiry.aspx

Instead of ticket prices being set by the theatre's perception of quality, the price is directly set by demand. Thus a very popular film at a very unpopular time will still have cheap seats available. As the cheap seats are booked up, the price rises.

Shame about the colour scheme - the inside of the cinema is the same bright corporate orange and white.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou opened a cinema (aka movie theater) in Milton Keynes, England which offered movies at very low prices by forcing customers to book in advance online. This cuts down the staffing costs. They also, initially at least, didn't sell refreshments and food and encouraged customers to bring their own food purchased elsewhere.

The movie industry saw this and, noticing what Stelios had done to the airline industry with his previous company EasyJet, refused to supply the EasyCinema with the latest releases to prevent them from creating a precedent forcing a decrease in prices at other cinemas.

EasyCinema is still around, which perhaps takes some clout of of my post, but it just serves to demonstrate that the movie industry is able to hurt cinemas which don't play along with their rules without requiring laws. EasyCinema still, to my knowledge, does not get movies on their day of official release, but I don't live in Milton Keynes so I don't pay that much attention! :)

In the UK Stelios Haji-Ioannou, he who founded easyjet and a dozen other budet businessew called easySomething has opened a new business called easyCinema. A budget cinema offering with minimal staff, not even a box office. You have to print a barcode ticket from their booking website and scan it at automated turnstiles to get it.

With the staff numbers cut to the bone, it ain't going to be too hard for people to smuggle in camcorders, which will no doubt worry the studios.

I am a foreign student currently studying abroad in Europe, meaning that probably I represent one of easy*'s biggest demographics. I (and all my friends) almost always fly easyJet to travel, we rent easyCar to drive to France or Andorra, and we check our e-mail abroad at easyInternetCafe. easy is the real thing--it's cheap as hell, especially if you book really early. On the other hand the "customer experience" leaves a lot to be desired. For example, in an effort to cut costs even further, easyInternetCafe literally fired all their employees except for about 15 at the home office. No actual easyInternetCafe employees, work in the easyInternetCafes. Which is at once dumbfounding and frustrating. If your computer crashes or the machine eats your money when you try to buy time, well, you're fucked. No recourse. Lots of the computers are broken, people leave their trash laying around, there are always wierdos looking at really sick, graphic porn, and worse, the cafes are unsafe. Twice now I have seen people brazenly mugged, in broad daylight, in nearly packed easyInternetCafes. Similar experiences on easyJet; they farmed out the personnel contract (at least here in Spain) to some company named EuroHandling, whose ticket agents are assholes and unwilling to help you out in any way, especially if you arrive after 40 minutes before departure time. So I'm a little skeptical of easyCinema, even though I'd probably give it a whirl if it came to a town near me. But sentences like "All we ask is that you don't leave any litter behind" sounds like a sweet way of saying, "we're not paying for janitors, please don't trash our theaters." Personally, I'll gladly pay the extra 2 to avoid sitting on someone else's half-eaten nachos, but hey, that's me.