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Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same?
gambit3 sends this quote from The Atlantic:
"Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn't seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?"
I've gone to see plenty of big films whose ticket prices were higher than the other films playing at the same theater in my town. I get that this is supposed to be a ~Big Evil Movie Industry~ article, but the premise isn't true--especially with Avatar, which the article acknowledges as an "interesting exception."
Economy of scale.
However it is probably a good time for the cinemas to approach the movie industry about trying this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why does it cost the same to park a big vehicle as to park a small vehicle?
Why isn't it cheaper to park at 6 AM and more expensive to park at 9 AM or noon?
On the contrary, it should be more expensive to see a bad movie since the production cost (+ profit) has to be payed for by fewer viewers. While massively successful movies should cost a dime due to economies of scale... the problem is that you don't know beforehand how the movie will do, so the price should change from day to day depending on its success... which of course would be complicated and thus it is easier to just pay the same for all movies.
What I've found interesting is that video games actually DO follow the rules of supply and demand, even at Best Buy, and this surprised me! Skyrim was on sale for a whopping $60, some less-popular-but-still-new games were in the $50s, and my brother and I got a good laugh when we saw poor Duke Nukem Forever sitting there for a measly $15.
demand typically tends to push prices of things that are of a limited quantity - resources, products, etc ... things such as movies, music don't fall into that category - a movie doesn't expire after a certain date, or after a certain number of views.
This isn't digital delivery... A real theater doesn't cost less to vacuum just because the movie sucked, and the cost of having an empty theater is the same operating cost as a full one, give or take a few minutes of hoovering.
That being said, cheap butts in seats for a lower price is better than none for a week.
If you really want to see a movie when it comes out you pay full price.
If you're on the fence about the movie or aren't in a a hurry you wait for the movie to move to a discount cinema.
Still others will wait until pay-per-view, or rental (B+M or online) with different sliding scales for pricing depending on movie age.
Others will just pirate it for free from the start.
What a bad place to start your argument. In classical economics, demand shifts affect pricing if supply is a factor. When it comes to movie distribution, supply usually isn't an issue.
Also, profits of Mission Impossible to to cover the losses of the gamble on Young Adult. Essentially, movie ticket prices are aggregated and normalized across movies to mitigate risk. Do you really want to spend $40/ticket on Mission Impossible so that Young Adult would cost only $3?
The actually hard-costs to the theaters (staff, electricity, rent, etc.) is pretty much the same regardless if 5 people are in the theater or 500, and is relatively minor in their overall operations. They pay back to the studios based on how many watchers they have, which where most of their expenses actually lie. They have to pay back the same amount to the studios regardless how how many tickets they sell, so why would they implement variable pricing?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Would you prefer movie tickets were priced the same way plane tickets were? With a fancy algorithm designed to maximize revenue?
For the opening of star wars you might pay $300 for a ticket, whereas the opening of an unknown movie you could end up paying $2.
The fixed price has more to do with the requirements of running a theater than is has to do with the cost to produce or the popularity of a movie.
You have to run your physical plant, your concessions, pay your property taxes, employees, cleaning crew (theoretically), and make payments to your mortgage. The price you pay to the studio distribution chain may or may not vary (I honestly don't know). But in any event it is a fairly small component of the overall ticket price.
The reality is that the less popular shows will hit the video release channels much sooner, as theater owners can't fill their seats. When theater owners can't attract an audience, the stop showing the film and it sooner or later ends up on video/dvds, along with the inevitable price drop to just a few dollars or 99 cents or whatever. The less popular movies often show up on TV well within one year.
With that move to video, the price to view will fall for the average viewer, in spite of the fact that some paid full price to view it in a theater, but more waited to view it at home.
The average viewer may not be interested in some movie at (insert theater price here) PER SEAT, but will spend $3 bucks or less, PER HOUSEHOLD.
The theater manager can't afford to let in an entire household (who bring their own popcorn, sodas, squalling kids and yaking on the phone) for 3 bucks.
The mistake here is assuming the movie is the only thing being purchased in the theater.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It's not like buying a car or computer. Nobody says "Hey, I REALLY want to see this movie, but for $3 less I'd settle for this other one, even though I won't enjoy it quite as much". Not only are you spending your money on a movie, you're also spending time. Given the choice between a horrible, free movie, or a $15 supremely kick ass one, I'd rather invest a little in my life and actually enjoy it. In other words, people don't watch shitty movies because they're shitty, not because the price was too high.
Ticket prices are the same because the studios mandate the minimum price for ticket prices. The standard agreement between the theatres and the studios specifies what percentage of the gate receipts the studio gets (can be as high as 90% of the ticket price) and that the theatre will charge a certain minimum price. There are exceptions to this, but that is a default situation. Ticket prices therefore don't float in response to market demand because the enitity charging the prices, the theatre, is contracted to keep them fixed above a certain minimum.
Theatres would give movie tickets away in some circumstances if they could, in order to get you to come in and buy the concessions, which is where they make the bulk of their money. Studios counteract this behavior by mandating the high prices in the film rental contracts.
I know this because I used to support a software system that managed theatre accounting for a chain of movie theatres.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Until someone with inside knowledge posts, this is all conjecture. Mine is that the distributors charge based on a per person basis that is relatively fixed. This may have to do with the antitrust cases that forced the studios to divest themselves of movie theatres. Second is that it's simpler for the ticket booth people. Or, it was prior to computerized consoles. It's also easier for mom and dad to drop their brats off at the theatre. Give each kid a $20 and let them figure it out.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Which remains constant. And playing a bad movie is still better than having an empty theater.
Theaters will often have announce "no passes" on their listings for any new releases that are expected or (have been already shown) to be big draws. This does not apply to paid passes, of course... it typically only applies to the sort of passes that are offered as promotional material during special events, or the type of passes that you sometimes get with a cereal box.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is Slashdot, the only acceptable price for a movie is 0 because it doesn't cost anything to copy it.
Well, like beer the movie tickets in Japan are 4 times the price. The movies are 6 months late and the ticket price is absurd.
You have to choose your seats as if sitting in a stadium and there's no matinee price. Only the late show is discounted so there's
always the chance to miss your last train home. A family of 4 going to the cinema is a hundred bucks! I can buy the blu-ray cheaper
and entertain the family at home...
For some like Mission Impossible series the haul is inevitably big but for most movies is is not known before-hand how well it will do at the box office.
Also I for one would not be happy if I paid $13 dollars for a movie and the next say it went down to $10.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Why are they the same price in theaters? Because the theater has to have the same ticket salesmen staffed, the concession stand open, the projectors running, and the after-movie cleanup done for both a high budget movie and a cheap one.
I'm low on time right now, so I'll read TFA when I get home out of curiosity, but damned well better say that from the theater's perspective it'll cost approximately the same manpower and electricity no matter what they're projecting onto that screen.
If you pay for MI and stay for Young Adult afterwards, then it is cheaper. But then you would be "stealing" depending on how you feel about it.
Copyright and patents are a con. Getting paid multiple times for work done once is crooked.
The real question is a distraction.
When you "steal" a movie online, the studio only loses "potential" sales. Likewise, when you do (or do not) watch a movie, the resources used to produce the movie remain constant. When 100,000,000 people watch the same movie, the production costs of the movie to the studios are the same as if 10 people watch it. In otherwords, supply and demand does not apply when we have infinitely reproducible units of trade. You do not "steal" a movie, rather you "unfairly take advantage" of someone else's hard work. It's similar to the stolen valor act. You can't actually "steal" valor, but you can take credit for something you don't deserve credit for. Movies expected to "make more money" are given bigger budgets -- they have more "viewers" which distributes the production costs. Movies expected to make less money are given smaller budgets, and the distributed viewership shares the lower production cost of the movie. Finally, "gambles" are factored into other movies, so a movie that loses money is compensated for elsewhere.
It's not really "greed," if you're demanding to see the biggest explosions. If you want cheap movies go order a low budget foreign film online -- and you'll pay for the corresponding lower budget. Or, you know, stop watching movies. No one is twisting your arm to shell out $$$ on overpriced movies. If Hollywood loses enough viewers, they'll scale back production costs, until the average viewer feels the cost is worth it. As long as people shell out premium $$$, movies will have premium production costs. Big fat corporate greed problems don't apply to ridiculous luxuries like big budget movies. The MPAA is not "forcing" you to consume their products, and it won't hurt you one bit if you don't buy their stuff. If you expect them to lower their costs, as if you're entitled to that, then you're the one being greedy.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
What you're buying isn't a ticket to watch a specific movie, you're buying a ticket to sit in a particular theater at a particular time--they just happen to be showing a movie at that time. Thus, the response to low demand for a particular movie isn't to lower the cost for seeing that movie, it's to show more showings of a movie that *is* getting butts in those seats. And you'll notice that's what happens. The poor performing movies fade from theaters much more quickly than more successful ones, which often times end up playing on more than one screen. *That's* why they continue to charge the same price for movie tickets.
Now, you could make an argument that the price of an individual showing should react to demand, but I'm not sure how that'd work. Responsive pricing means that the first few people get screwed on their ticket price if demand turns out to be less than expected and the price drops, or the price of the last few seats to a popular showing is going to be much higher, which probably wouldn't fly well with people, and I'm not sure there's a big incentive for the theaters to do that. Increasing the price of tickets for popular movies seems to be a great way to incentivize people who can wait for DVD releases to do so, and theaters are already struggling against that mindset.
I think a good answer is "because people would be pissed off if they had to think too much about the price". Or perhaps another way of putting it is that "the market is more efficient when the price of the movie is fixed and other factors are allowed to fluctuate".
The producers know that their product will sell for a fixed price, and they aim to sell as many as possible. It's easier that way. Consumers know that there is one price at any given time, and they adjust it by waiting longer if they want to lower it.
Perhaps the best answer is, "this is the social contract, and everybody is happy enough with it".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Also I for one would not be happy if I paid $13 dollars for a movie and the next say it went down to $10.
Americans, bah!
people are wary of buying crap, and low prices are perceived to be a signal of this. so far, not too bad. however movies aren't fungible. if i mildly want to see X, and it's half the price of Y (which i don't want to see), i might well conclude that X is garbage after all and stay home. this assumes that the prices are somehow published in advance of getting to the theatre, which is its own problem but seems absolutely necessary to avoid appearing to be a bait-and-switch. people really hate feeling like they're being nickled-and-dimed (even irrationally so). airline industry can get away with it since it's mostly a fungible service, but it's suicide for entertainment.
i remember a long time ago, they developed soda vending machines that automatically jacked up the price above a certain temperature or heat index. the media jumped on it, and i don't think they deployed a single one.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Bargain matinees are cheaper. Same movie.
Not all theaters charge the same. Some, in Portland, Oregon, charge only $6.00 or so.
Examples are the Clinton, the Hollywood, the Bagdad, and the Laurelhurst.
And some of those also offer real food, not just candy.
Please shop around!
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
Not quite... When you "steal" a movie online, you take away some of the copyright holder's exclusivity to determine who is allowed to actually make such copies in the first place. Since exclusivity, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, you are permanently depriving the copyright holder of that right, which was supposed to be guaranteed to him by having a copyright in the first place. This effectively lessens the worth of copyright for *ALL* copyright holders, not just the the copyright holder on whose work you may have infringed on, and, assuming that copyright is valuable to society, would, by extension, be harmful to society as a whole.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This practice -- known, wonkily, as uniform pricing -- isn't specific to movies. It's true for sports, where I pay the same price for a football ticket whether the Redskins are playing the New England Patriots or the St. Louis Rams.
Many sports teams have "premium" pricing when big name opponents come to town.
For example... http://baltimore.orioles.mlb.com/bal/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp - even standing room only tickets are more expensive when the Yankees come to town.
http://www2.kusports.com/news/2008/jan/26/kansas_raises_football_seasonticket_prices_slightl/ - Kansas actually charged four different prices for football games in 2008 - one for non-conference teams, one for conference teams nobody in Lawrence gives a shit about, one for Texas, and one for the big in-state rival Kansas State.
I realize I'm picking nits, but no, this claim made by the author is not usually accurate, and it should not be used to legitimize what movie theaters do.
The reason is that the price is setup to pay for the "movie going experience", paying for the theater. But the reality is that a film that was less expensive to make should cost less to see it. That would be a good idea for the industry to embrace to combat feeling like they need to have a huge block buster, huge budget film to make any traction.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit: charge a little more, and you discourage enough people that you end up with less profit; charge a little less, and while you may get more customers, you still end up with less profit.
If it were practical to determine this optimal price, any rational cinema would charge it.
You've hit the nail on the head. A rational cinema might charge that price, true. But the cinema business is not strictly rational, any more than any other media business is (think: "agency model" pricing for ebooks).
Some in the UK may remember when the founder of EasyJet proposed to do just what is suggested. He wanted to create a chain of theaters that priced seats based on demand, in much the same way that EasyJet prices airline seats. Theoretically, you'd be able to see a first-run movie for as little as £0.20, depending on time, date, and how well the screening was showing. He couldn't do it, however, because he couldn't reach agreement with the film studios over a flat-rate pricing scheme that would allow him to set his own prices for seats.
Breakfast served all day!
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Young Adult is unlikely to make significantly more money if priced lower - and if it does, some of that additional revenue will probably come at the expense of revenue for Mission Impossible.
Let's assume a simple breakdown:
$10 tickets
9 people see MI
1 person sees YA
$100 total revenue
Now, instead we charge $10 for MI, but only $2 for YA; as a result, one of the MI viewers chooses YA instead, and a full additional 5 people also choose to watch YA (this is a pretty optimistic scenario)
8 people see MI
7 people see YA
$94 total revenue
The studios as a whole see less revenue even though there are many more total moviegoers (50% increase!). Many people decide to "see a movie" and then pick which movie. As such, lowering the price on one film while keeping it high on another will likely simply move some moviegoers away from the expensive film to the cheaper one. It also puts an even higher risk of failure on big budget movies. TFA suggests that movies with larger budgets will charge higher prices. I'm sure that would work great for The Green Lantern and other already-failed ventures. Forcing big budget films to compete in price as well as quality will drive far more viewers to cheaper, indie films. Why exactly would the businesses want that? Alternatively, they could attempt to set prices in advance based on their expectations of success, but if studios were really better at identifying good movies, they wouldn't make so many damnably bad ones.
Reading TFA, I would also note that the author is flat-out incorrect in one of his other 'uniform pricing' examples. Not all sports games are priced the same - pretty much every team will offer miniplans priced based on the opponents and dates of play (better opponents or weekend games = higher miniplan costs). The fact that single-game tickets are usually the same price (and not even this is always true in sports) is done in an attempt to drive consumers towards the multi-game miniplans. It's with the goal of producing more total revenue given that "seats" are an existing sunk cost. Not because the team believes that watching Lakers - Celtics or Yankees - Red Sox is worth the same as any other potential opponent.
The author mentions a couple of very specific examples, but they don't really prove his point that moving prices are good for both studio and theater. Note that in his second example in which DC theaters cut weekday ticket prices by 2/3rds, popcorn purchases double. That suggests twice as many moviegoers (unless a disproportionate number of the 'new' moviegoers hate popcorn - which I admit is possible, as they're likely the more frugal viewers given their price sensitivity). But given we don't have specific data, I think it's fair to assume overall ticket revenues for the weekdays were likely lower. Again, an illustration: $9 tickets, sell 5 = $45 revenue. $3 tickets (cut price by 2/3rds), sell 10 (2x customers), $30 revenue. That's a full 33% lower revenue on ticket prices. Good luck pushing that on the movie studios.
I'm not suggesting that the pricing is the RIGHT one. Only that the pricing is set the way it is in an attempt by the studios and theater chains to maximize *total* revenue within the system. They may be wrong, but a variable pricing model in which all movies (as opposed to the rare one-off examples TFA gives) must compete against other movies with unequal pricing will almost certainly be a less-successful model, given that the studios really just won't know how to price anything.
Where shit teams some time just have to give away tickets and some even have deals like seats with unlimited food. Where good teams don't have that and some even have standing room only.
Now why can't movies be the same way? Some movies are the type to see on the big screen at $7-$9 /each but others why pay the same price when can you wait for PPV / VOD and pay like $5-$6 for a room full of people.
All movie *rentals*, on any medium, are also the same - and you can see the free market at work in charging you more for "New & Popular" rather than "Last Years and Older", so it's not because video store owners are unaware of the market.
Speaking of discs, the finest Springsteen album may actually be cheaper in your music store than deservedly-obscure indie bands doing death metal with accordions, because of the longer production run.
A paperback of The Da Vinci Code also sells for the same as a paperback of Lithuanian poetry.
Content just sells by different rules than physical objects. That's one of the reasons that applying physical-object valuation to the "costs of piracy" is sensed as "not right" by most people who hear the comically-high figures.
If you walk out of the rental store with a shoplifted CD or DVD, you're walking out with all the embedded value in it of the store's shipping costs, their total rent, salaries and other operating and capital costs divided by the number of discs in the store. (Which is the same whether the disc is Raiders or Norbit.) When you just take the content itself, that value is not lost.
The implied question is, why hasn't anything ever been done about it?
You dont charge different rates for different oranges, figs, corn cons. The definition of a commodity fits most movies.
Gently reply
Movie houses hook people into going to theatres The one-price-fits-all strategy tries to keep us from rejecting movies because either the price may be too high from a cost-benefit concern or the price may be too low from a quality concern. Going to a theatre becomes the event and the movie is simply a bonus.
Theatres in my neighbourhood have taken this one step further by offering premium seating, where seats are larger and further apart, as well as being assigned. The premium charged is $2, which, based on a recent interview on the Lang & O'Leary Exchange seems to be working well for them.
This contrasts with concert venues, which charge premiums for the more popular musical acts. Concert venues are less concerned with repeat business as profits are calculated after each show. Movie houses need repeat business in order to pay their enormous fixed costs, with profits calculated each quarter.
Nope. When you download a movie illegally, you're not the one making the copy; it's the person sharing the movie with you that does.
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Movies are popular attractions for dates*. You can take a date to a bad movie, and won't necessarily reflect poorly upon you. But if you take a date to a bad movie because happened to be cheaper than a putative good movie, you're just not getting laid**.
* A social activity with a potential or established romantic goals.
** Sexual intercourse.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Unlike cars, computers, or refrigerators, each movie is a unique product. Yes, even the remakes. As a unique product it cannot be substituted for a similar product that costs less. For example, if you wanted to replace a car part you usually have options to buy that part from the car manufacturer or from 3rd party parts suppliers. However, if you wanted to watch Mission Impossible there isn't any other option. It's not like the movie studio takes the same script and hires Bollywood actors to produce a less expensive version. As others have noted, it's the same with buying books.
As a result of each movie being a unique product, the movie theaters price them the same. Whether you consider a movie "better" than another is a personal opinion and has no relevance on pricing. In fact, it usually isn't until a movie has been showing for a week or so that the studios know whether they have a hit on their hands or not.
Another property of unique products is that, as you have found out, pricing is inelastic. This is business 101.
Interesting: Tickets per Capita have not increased or decreased in the last 40 years. So we are looking at a Monopoly market that do not follow normal supply and demand rules. Alternatively the product is not the Movie but the Theatre Going Experience.
1. When the block buster movie is full, we will buy a ticket for another less popular movie and come back later for the more popular movie.
2. Psychologically (I'd like to see the stats to prove this) Gambling rules apply here. We throw money at the Screen hoping for a good experience. If you have a good experience you will keep on throwing money at the Screen hoping to get a similar experience.
3. According to the graph ticket prices do not seem to effect sales. (Monopoly) We are not rational consumers when it comes to Movies.
4. In movie theatres the product is not the movie but the Movie Going Experience.
5. Supply is unlimited.
6. Tickets sales is a very small part of actual income for a movie.
7. Costs are relative fixed.
.. doesn't make it right...
I posit that soulskill is NOT like millions of Americans.
I, for one, didn't even know there was a mission impossible movie.
Why would anyone support an actor who is a such a massive asshat, anyway?
-
Only if you stream the content without storing it or caching it. If you store it, you are making a local copy (a personal use copy, admittedly... although if the source copy was infringing, then there is a plausible argument that even a personal use copy made from that should be infringing also). But you are nitpicking... I was talking about online copyright infringement in general, and had not used the term 'downloading' once in my above comment.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's called GIMME!
A couple of places I've lived in the past had $2 theaters where you could go watch a few-months-old movie for $2. You just had to wait until it hit the $2 theater. I miss having a nearby art theater too, closest one to where I live takes about an hour to get to. Most of my favorite movies, I saw in art theaters. The one near where I used to live had Akira one time! How cool is that?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There used to be a time, in my area at least, when movies that were bad would end up in 2nd rate movie theaters fairly quickly.
I remember the movie Soldier ended up there after a week or 2 in major theaters for 2 dollars. I remember because I paid full price at the time for the premiere showing and was seriously annoyed to see it go down to such a price so quickly.
Other movies would end up there after months of having made their money at the regular rates.
That gave the opportunity for people who were patient or unwilling to pay full price to enjoy those movies for a small price.
Unfortunatly, in these enlighten days, no such place seems to still exist anymore or are usually far and out of the way so people are reduced to blatant piracy to see movies they wouldn't dare pay a penny to see.
Nicely done.
Seriously if you know the movie ticket is x dollars and decide to go to the movies it takes that out of the equation. If you start charging multiple price you add uncertainty and get to the theater and not know what the price is going to be.
Stability is a factor to consider.
They used to have second run theaters not so much anymore that did charge less for older movies but it was always the same lesser price for all movies but for some reason they seem to have gone the way of the VCR (at least in Southern California).
We regret to inform all of you of Mr. Thompson's unexpected passing in a small plane crash the day after his article was published. The Movie Producers Association of America would like to take this moment to express our condolances.
I suspect it's largely because they don't want to incentivize people to buy tickets to the cheap movie, and sneak into the more expensive one (or spend the money to implement security procedures that would limit that to a minimum).
People have been sneaking into movies ever since movie theaters were invented.
Many enterprising young people would be buying $3 B-movie tickets to watch $11 blockbuster hits.
Haven't been to one in ages; the pause button on my remote doesn't work there, I need to deal with noisy people, I can't control the volume, I'm stuck with a limited and expensive food selection. I'm hard-pressed to think of a movie that is really better on the big screen, and even then I'd probably rather put a larger TV and decent sound system in my house.
You are assuming the supply of each movie is fixed. They can change the supply by modifying the number of theaters each is shown in. Movies that are unpopular play for shorter periods.
I think it would be smart if theaters did variable pricing, but it wouldn't necessarily mean Mission Impossible would be more expensive (since it would probably play longer). But in the most efficient world, there would be lower prices in play to lessen the number of empty seats, which could be considered waste.
If Mission Impossible was $10 and Young Adult was $2, it would be an admission that Young Adult was a lesser movie and would cause less sales.
Movie prices are all the same because the studios/distributors set them to be the same; it's not up to the cinema owner to decide, because the box office goes almost entirely to the distributor.
So why do the studios set them the same? A big part of it is "perceived value". If they priced Young Adult at half the price of Mission Impossible, a substantial segment of the market would conclude that MI was a "better" movie than YA. It would be perceived as a demonstration that the studio doesn't have faith in YA and figures that they only way they can get people to see it is by "bribing" them with a lower price. In a market where opening-weekend sales are critical to a movie being financially successful or not, studios need to hype each product as "the best". (It's the same reason why the top-grossing half dozen movies each weekend are further hyped as "#1 gross-out comedy in America" or "#1 action dramedy" for the entire following week.) With variable pricing, you'd also have studios trying to use higher prices as a selling point. Suppose you have two CGI action films to choose from, one priced at $14, the other at $11. The first one must really be good if they're charging that much for it! And even if the cheaper film has 10% higher attendance, the more expensive film still outgrosses it and gets the bragging rights for the weekend.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Only idiots go to a theater to see a movie.
The good news is, there is a sterilizer ray mounted under the seats,
so the birth rate for idiots will soon diminish significantly.
>demand is supposed to move prices ...
In a free market demand may be related to price. In a monopoly market the monopoly cartels choose whatever prices they want. Simple economics.
Inelastic demand. You don't know how much it sucks or rocks until after you see it and when you tell your friends the answer, a $4 ticket vs a $10 ticket will not change your propensity to consume.
It's a racket.
JJ
assuming that copyright is valuable to society
The public domain is valuable to society. Copyright was created to get more people to create content for the public domain. We seem to have forgotten that. Since we have damaging and abusive laws protecting Imaginary Property when the public domain has been harmed by special interest legislation, copyright holders can listen to the world's smallest violin.
You were a sucker for paying anything in the first place going to some fetid, dark room with a sticky floor, over priced artery clogging, diabetes inducing, crap food, obnoxious cell phone users and general morons lacking any manners at all.
That's why.
"oh but if no one pays they can't make Things That Go Boom 5" and what a shame that would be, your need to be entertained sickens the World, and they wonder why we have no culture.
Given that copyright was, by your own words, created to get more people to create content for the public domain, one could reasonably conclude therefore that harming the value of copyright is also counterproductive to getting people to create content for the public domain as well.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You won't see demand for an individual film affecting the price, because the film is not the resource; the movie theater space is. If a film performs badly, it will be shown in fewer theaters, fewer times per day. Other, more popular films get shown instead.
As a theater owner, you don't want to lower the ticket price for a film in order to sell more tickets, when you could simply replace it with another film that will sell well at the same price.
In high-school economics terms: If your machine can switch between guns or butter easily, then unless the butter market is already saturated, less people buying guns will simply mean more butter production, with no effect on the price of either.
I agree with strong copyright laws if the exclusive rights lasts for about 15 years, or whatever is reasonable for the market. Longer than that is simply corruption that needs to be corrected. But these days, with technology, convenience, and economies of scale that were never before possible, I am skeptical that we need any government laws to protect content producers. The laws protecting content produces harm the general public more than help.
A while ago, corporations could only exist if it was proven that their existence was a benefit to the public. Now, we right laws that protect the corporations from the general public. It seems like everything about laws these days are backwards.
Well, on this note, why doesn't Netflix change its prices every month? It can't do this because whenever the price increased, many customers would stop using Netflix. People wouldn't notice as much when the price went down. Likewise, when I went to the theater, if the price was lower than last time, I would not think about it. But, if the price was higher, I would be angry and probably stop going to the theater.
Some ice cream flavors must cost more than others to make. And some flavors must be more popular than others. Same question goes for coke vs diet coke vs sprite. My guess is the potential for customer outrage. If I typically went to $5 movies then splurged on a $20 movie but didn't like it as much as the $5 movies I'd seen, I would be pissed and complain. Same would go for the ice cream scenario. The tiered pricing for these types of situations may look good on paper, but end up being more trouble than it's worth.
Because Movie Execs are uniformly greedy.
I don't ever recall advocating long copyright terms either... I only suggest that if copyright is valuable to society, then infringing on it is bad for that same society. Lengthening copyright is almost certainly harmful to society as well, but I think that point #5 at http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/rb_fallacies.html adequately addresses the notion of responding to one bad thing with another, and I personally share that position.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why so many people still pay 9+ dollars to see a movie when 96% of the stuff that comes out is unmitigated shit? And thats just for one ticket, god forbid you take someone and then you want popcorn or a drink.
For cost of 2 movie tickets you could buy a movie, or pay for a month and a half of netflix, or buy several movies used or hit a torrent site and watch the shit for free so atleast you only feel like youve wasted your time instead of your time and money.
A major reason why all movies cost the same price (at a given theater) is that the theater owners don't want you think think about the price of the ticket, which you would have to do if you got to pick different movies at different prices. Instead, they want you to go to the theatre and pay the price for going to the movies. Yes, they''ll charge extra for 3D, popcorn and drinks. But it's all on top of a fixed ticket price, which you pay because you have no choice, so you don't even think about it. This isn't all bad - the same logic that keeps them from dropping ticket pricess for unpopular movies also prevents them from raising prices on popular movies.
If the movies were different prices, how would it work?
If the most popular movies were cheaper, based on "economies of scale", that would break the movie businesses. Keep in mind that the large majority of movies lose money, so they make a profit based on a small percentage of hits. If they dropped the ticket prices for the big hits, that would eliiminate most of the money that paid for all of the other movies. And, of course, dropping the price of your most popular product doesn't seem like a way to optimize revenue.
You could argue the reverse, that that prices should be higher for the most popular movies, and lower for the unpopular ones. That at least makes sense in that people would be willing to pay more for things that are more popular. Lucikly for us, the movie guys have figured out that raising prices on "hit" movies would irritate viewers more than the potential revenue.
Instead, the way the movie business works, they price the same movie at different prices through different channels over time. First it hits the first run theatres that charge the highest prices. Later it hits second run theatres, who charge less for tickets to people that don't mind waiting (and going to less nice theatres). Then pay-per-view TV, then DVD sales, and TV broadcast. The "hit" movies make more money in theatres, because even though ticket prices are fixed, more people go to see the movie. Later, all of the deals are negotiated - if a network wants to broadcast Avatar in 3D, they'll pay a lot more than broadcasting Plan 9 From Outer Space. And for the "not-hit" movies, they show in fewer theatres, and hope to make a little on PPV, etc.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Do you have the slightest idea how stupid the movie going public is? It would be a customer service nightmare trying to explain price differences to these people. Hell most theaters have a Matinee price and a standard price usually after 5 or 6 pm and that causes issues on a daily basis, add to that most theaters are staffed by high school kids and you'd have a recipe for disaster. Imagine having to wait in line while every 5th customer has to have the pricing structure explained to them during a tent pole release like The Dark Knight Rises. Then take in to account all the various software packages and reporting schedules to the studios and you add even more layers of complexity to an already taxed system again mostly being handled by high school students. Theaters make there money from concessions not ticket prices. Some movies cost theaters thousands of dollars just to get them and then 40% -75% percent of the ticket prices on top of that. It's an interesting academic question to pose but in reality it would never work out side of a handful of niche theaters.
Newer venues cost the theater quite a bit more then ones which have been ongoing. One of my friends explained the price drop in the cost of their seat license in terms of weeks. Most don't really make it past the 4th to 5th week which is when the cost to the actual cinema drops significantly. I believe the major exception which was home alone which aired for more then one Christmas.
Only in some very large cinema complexes have I seen varied rates and these were grouped by wing. They controlled the flow of traffic into those wings with gateed access and of course there were employees at each gate validating tickets. With multiple level and multiple wings they can dictate cost.
Otherwise, I would envision a good deal of people purchasing tickets for the lesser know film and stopping by the slightly more expensive one.
It's been a while since I've actually seen gated access to the individual theaters in large complexes likely due to cost.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult,
Well there is your problem, if your going to pay any money to see the clambake meister Tom Cruse, they know they've got a rube on the hook.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The more screen you have gives you more room to flex out the showing times. It's like the old pre VOD PPV on digital cable and on satellite to day where you have 20-30+ PPV channels that show movies on a rolling base with say the same movie on say 5 channels.
Simple Solution 1: Rent it at home. Avoid the theatre.
Simple Solution 2: Base prices on their rank in theatres. All new films are same price, after that they're ranked. Top 5 movies cost more than 6-10, 11-15, etc.
Simple Solution 3: Go, enjoy, shut up.
Simple solution to changing the prices is to take action and make a choice on what you will do about it.
As for different popularities of movies being priced the same, well this is economics in action. There aren't a bunch of empty screens at the theaters, and there's also no shortage where there's new movies not in the theater. There is not incentive at all to mark down less popular movies. They simply allocate one screen to an unpopular movie, and more to popular ones.
As for movie prices being the same... well, 3D movies cost more to watch than normal ones. And, although there isn't one locally, there's a theater about 20 miles away that plays second run movies, so they're like $5 instead of almost $10.
In the UK you can pay a £20 a month membership fee to see all the films you want. You are still required to queue for tickets (for all but big films you can probably collect them a day or two in advance but there is no online ordering at least not with the Cineworld chain).
A monthly membership is a great liberator. You feel no guilt about going to see the lastest dumb comedy featuring a comedian you've never heard of and involving a sport only Americans care about. The only thing you waste is time since you've already paid. There are films by Ben Stiller I have almost enjoyed -- or at least didn't hate -- since I saw them effectively for free. I've watched some terrible films but I feel I got some value out of it. I suffer idiots on cell phones same as everyone else but but aside from that I get an almost satisfactory cinema experience.
I don't know what teh economists call it anymore but the common sense fancy words are "collusive oligopoly"
They may not sit down in a smokey room to hash prices but they fix them none-the-less. The emergent market forces Holywood greedmongers have engineered with their decades long domination of the traditional media are incredibly powerful
To begin with point #5, the law must first be assumed ethical. See "I was just following orders." The public's burden of corporate special interests is already quite high, and our corrupt political and economic system needs to either be reformed or loose credibility. To the degree that reform fails, the loss of credibility for a corrupt system is ethical. Luckily, we are not near any kind of breaking point yet, and I hope that someday the pendulum starts to swing the other way, but it is conceivable and historically probable that we the people continue to support a corrupt system until very painful and long lasting damage is done. Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent resistance that can effect change. Its utilization can avoid later violent resistance. I like laws and a functioning government, and oddly enough, the best way to protect all laws is to sometimes break a few bad ones (nonviolently, of course). Interestingly, breaking laws is the only way that the justice system can correct these kind of things, but it seems to be sorely underused.
I personally do not commit copyright infringement, but I happen to be lucky enough to afford the ability to avoid copyright infringement. I cannot cannot condemn copyright infringement when artificial scarcity is being inflicted upon the infringers by the lobbyists of the large content producers. To have sympathy for the large content producers and the corrupt system that inflicts harm onto others is to invite Stockholm syndrome.
Here's hoping that things improve, but things are not going to improve via complacency. These kinds of discussions are needed, and oddly enough, they are fueled by the conflict between the infringer and infringee. Humanity is flawed, and I prefer to be realistic about ourselves. I prefer philosophy that takes into account all systems rather than focusing on only a few (and ignoring the rest at potential detriment).
The movie studios won't look at it that they should give you a discount for the unpopular movies, they'll see this as an opportunity to charge more for the popular movies. Maybe that's why ticket prices have been going up over time.
Well, I did begin my statement above with the condition of "assuming copyright is a good thing"... if one does not agree with the premise of copyright, for whatever reason, then the whole argument is moot.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
lol @ "US Survey Shows Piracy Common and Accepted" a few hours later. No, I did not submit it. :-)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/04/0240206/us-survey-shows-piracy-common-and-accepted
Given the number of people who say/think "I would go to the movies more often if it was cheaper" (myself included), wouldn't it benefit the studios to change the way the theaters are allowed to charge for tickets and lower the prices (especially at the times of the day or week when business is usually quiet) which would result in more bums on seats and more profit for the studios (especially considering the large % of ticket revenue that goes to studios)
I bet a lot more people would go to the movies at $10 than would go at $20.
1: They don't, at least not in Sweden, they go from 80 SEK to 150 SEK or so.
2: People know what it costs to go to the cinema if everything costs the same, entertainment is more fun if you don't have to think about the money you are spending.
Or to put in another way, if you are going to see a movie, having to decide whether to spend more to see a certain movie detracts from the experience.
3: Smaller movies are less interesting, the incitament of noticably lower prices is not certain to recoup benefits, instead, they might even have to charge more to make as much money on them.
just as well as expensive wine.
crappy movie.. well, that doesn't work quite like alcohol.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In my local cinema we have sofas you can book in the cinema itself. And during the show I can text the bar to place my drinks and snacks order and they bring them to my seat and I settle up at the end.
I simply don't bother seeing films in the cinema any more unless they are showing there.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
And the auto-focus systems of most cameras use IR LEDs.
How did this get modded up to +5??? Only active auto focus systems use IR to determine focus. The vast majority of camera auto focus systems use passive techniques such as phase detection and contrast detection and have nothing to do with IR.
...making films in India, the difference in prices for different movies for a ticket do not make sense.
Once that happens, then it will be a fight to cheaper tickets between Distributors and Producers. It will be very counterproductive. Everyone will suffer - like the Airline Industry - the tickets are so cheap it just does not make sense as a business model.
But I would like to see cheaper prices overall. In India multiplex tickets costs Rs. 80 (weekdays - early morning shows) to Rs. 250 (weekends, first day first shows.) Rs. 80 (~ US$1.50) is a sensible ticket price for a single movie ticket for all shows. Rs. 100 and above puts away most of the viewers.
The bean counters with exhibitors probably fiddled with spreadsheets and concluded it is better to sell the first day first show tickets for an inflated price and attract hard core viewers (fans).
The fans will only go for the latest, greatest, mainstream drivel. So every non-mainstream film, however good suffers because it needs the 'word of mouth' effect for a decent chance at BO.
We have noticed the same in US/Canada.
Anyways, here is the latest film from us - facebook.com/theblueberryhunt
Because economy 101 is by and large a purely theoretical science with little to no relation to the real world, which at times resembles what you learn there, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
No, I am serious. You are being taught all these nice things about free market and how prices set at the equillibrium point between supply and demand, yadda, yadda.
Don't forget to read the fine print. The "free market" and "equillibrium price" model assumes such highly realistic things as full transparency for everyone and a non-limited number of sellers and buyers. Nowhere in the real world has anything like that ever been seen.
The real world is full of price-fixing, limited supply or demand, cooperation deals, loss-leader sales, externalities, scale effects, psychological price-setting (the reason everything costs *.99 or *.95) and so on and so forth.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What is the obsession with fucking popcorn and drinks in this thread?
As I am not ten, I go to the cinema to watch a film, not to guzzle down crap and annoy the perople next to me.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
In the UK Picturhouse price differently depending on if you go at the weekend (expensive) or during the week (cheap). So recently, I went on an Orange Wednesday( Mobile network that offers a buy one get one free), used a Picture House member discount and two of us saw Drive for £5 (about $7). They also run Monday night student nights.
The place even has a bar, reclining seats AND let you take drinks into the auditorium (although I do recommend that wine glasses don't stand well in the cup holder and ask them to put the wine in a pint glass).
The film selection is slightly more eclectic and they do have directors pop in for Q&A sessions.
I sound like a salesman, but seriously, that cinema chain really really really loves films.
from tfa...
not true.
it is, perhaps, in the nfl (what tfa references.. washington redskins football) because of the limited number of regular season home games per year (eight)..
but in other pro sports in north america with a lot more home games per season (41 in nba/nhl, 81 in mlb, in a full regular season)... higher prices for ''premium'' or ''marquee'' games is very common:
example:
the nba's lakers base ticket price ranges from $25 (nosebleed seats on an end) to $280 (lower bowl, courtside).
when the lakers host houston, charlotte, portland, minnesota, or new jersey this season, tickets start at only $10 ($10-265).
but when chicago, new york, dallas, okc, or san antonio come to town the prices go up to $80-450.... and when it's miami or boston, better put a second on the house (or stay at home and watch on tv), tickets jump to $150-900.
this isn't exclusive to the nba either.. major league baseball and national hockey league teams do this too.
Over here in the UK one of the cinema chains (Cineworld) has a thing called an Unlimited Card. For £14.99 a month you can see as many movies as you like (with a couple of restrictions). Given that single adult ticket prices are now over £8 for 2D films it's pretty easy to see that this is a no-brainer if you want to see more than a couple of movies a month. Having one also tends to expand your options of what movies you see in the cinema - for example, back when I was paying full price for movie tickets, I'd only have gone to see triple-A blockbusters every once in a while, but now I go to the cinema most weekends and usually see two or three movies including some that aren't on the A-list.
The restrictions aren't particularly onerous: you can't book online or by telephone, you have to show up at the cinema with your card (it has a photo on it, so it's not transferable); once you've got a ticket for one movie you can't get another movie ticket until after the first movie ends; and there is a small surcharge for 3D movies (currently £1.50, and you need to bring your own 3D glasses, or you can purchase some for a further 80p). I was initially a bit concerned about not being able to book in advance but I've had the card for almost 2 years now and the only time I ever had any trouble getting in to the showing I wanted was Harry Potter 7 part 2 (I was able to get in to a later showing).
communism! the movie, music, game and tv industries are communist!!! i know i am most likely wrong, but proving it would prove rather difficult.
You are, however, complicit in the act.
Without you doing the downloading, they wouldn't have uploaded it to you.
product placement and advertizing (the main character drinks a coke). i dont need more advertizing. commercials within a movie, and yet prices soar even higher. on a large scale, people are not going to the movies as much, but prices are soaring ever higher. the less people that go, the higher the price. the guy behind the desk at the top will get his money. pure, simple greed/communism. cant say for sure it is either, but sure looks it.
Art films and classical music or any "highbrow" content would starve under your logic. Using this argument, ballet and opera houses should be charging $1 tickets because there isn't that much demand to see them instead of the hundreds of dollars they charge. Everything should be demand driven right?
The fact that this idea has been openly voiced means that the crappy movies will charge less, make less money and stop being produced and the mega-blockbusters will charge more, make even more money and the only thing we have to look forward to are the generic blockbuster, one size fits all movie. Great. Of course, when this model fails it will be because of piracy too.
When you go to the movies, you're not paying to see the movie: you're paying for the right to walk into the theater. You simply buy a ticket that says "I'm going to see Mission: Impossible".
Every cineplex in my area now, you can buy a ticket for ANY movie you want and then walk into any other movie they're showing on their 20+ screens. This is why the price is the same for "Mission Impossible" and "Generic Indie Flick 12".
It's also why it's idiotic to pay extra for IMAX/3D movies. Show up for the Indie flick, walk in the IMAX flick. They never check tickets at the door to each screen anymore (because that requires STAFF!)
I think part of the reason is also honesty. At all the theaters around here there is 1 ticket taker for the 12, 18, or 24 screens. If I were a self-entitled teen with no money because all the older laid off people took my entry level minimum wage jobs (I'm not), I'm sure that my friends and I would just by cheaper ticket to Movie X and walk into the Movie Y theater. Assuming of course that we couldn't just sneak in.
The other reason is the perception of quality as mentioned in several other posts.
Sure supply is an issue .. it is called seat count. Even with digital distribution eliminating the costs of physical film, there are still a limited number of projectors, and limited number of screens and a limited number of seats. At any given moment a theater could increase supply for a given movie by increasing screen count and thus seat count, but at the detriment of another movie's seat count. That might be the right move if there are people waiting in line to see "Opening Ngiht Blockbuster" and not "4 Week Old Sleeper Niche Cult" Film. But between those two extremes is an opportunity to adjust pricing so that you can fill the seats of that Sleeper ... a film that might even have a higher per-seat profit if it isn't costing you as much as the Blockbuster.
So now the question becomes an optimization problem based on limited screen/seat count, content licensing costs etc etc.
As for why would they implement variable pricing ... because if they + studios pulled their heads out their assess they might be able to work out a mutually beneficial business model. Really it is nothing more than a more granular approach to second run movies. Instead of removing a film from first run at price X and then sending it to a crappier second run theater at price Y (Y X) they just lower the cost of the movie to the "first run theater" gradually over time as demand goes down. They already reduce supply costs by reducing screen / seat count. This is just the next step.
Of course second run theaters would then struggle since fewer people will be left who have not already seen the movie, but there still might be a market for them to fill.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
N/T
I suggest you watch the movie Koyaanisqatsi, or at least watch the section on youtube labeled "The Grid" and "Microchip"
People are less than AI agents. They are merely corpuscles in the machine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sps6C9u7ras&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1
--
BMO
"Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit".
Yes, but there's also another movie being released which might do better. Why work so hard to make a bad movie make money, if you're a cinema, when you can just kick the movie out of your theater and show something else which *will* make money? I've seen lots of movies advertised which were only in theaters for one weekend, and were gone the next.
The point is, if your movie won't sell tickets at $10, they'll find another movie which will. They won't lower the price to $5 and hope people will see it just because it's cheap.
Y'know, this has never occurred to me, but it's a really great point. There are a lot of movies that want to see but simply won't due to the cost, mostly "smaller" films that don't benefit from the big screen. But if I could see them for, say, $3-5 instead of $8-10+, well then I think there's a much greater chance of me going to the theater. Toss in reasonably-priced popcorn and soda and it would be a no-brainer. Alas you're dealing with a dinosaur industry that doesn't seem to understand it needs to adapt if it wants to survive. So sadly I don't really have any hope of the system changing any time soon.
An additional thought occured to me - what I said above is true for weekend-to-weekend sales, because they can easily change what movie is showing from one weekend to the next.
However, it seems to me that if any movie is not sold out by about 5 minutes before the show, movie theaters could do last minute "fire sales" - discount the remaining tickets 30-50% to try to get people who are cheap to fill up those remaining seats. However, you then run the risk of alienating your customers because some people in that theater payed less than others, so the people who payed more might feel screwed.
Shouldn't it be the other way around - since Mission Improbable has gazillions of customers, that should drive the price to watch it down, if anything (if it cost 100 million to make it and 100 million watch it, that's only $1 per person to break even). However, that would drive the price of good-but-less-popular movies up, so I don't really like that idea, either. I'm much more inclined to watch the "sleepers" than the blockbusters.
While on the whole I entirely agree with you, I'd like to point out a few exceptions (off the top of my head):
1) Inception
2) Crash (the Paul Haggis one, not the Cronenberg one)
3) Hugo
4) A History of Violence
5) Bridge to Terabithia
6) Black Swan
7) Attack the Block
8) We Need to Talk about Kevin
9) Son of Rambow
10) Che
11) The Dark Knight
12) Moon
13) Source Code
14) There Will Be Blood
15) Pan's Labyrinth
16) Little Miss Sunshine
17) Gran Torino
18) Children of Men
19) Up (the 1st 20 minutes are utterly heartbreaking and worth the admission *on their own*)
20) District 9
Hell, even the recent Guy Richie Sherlock Holmes movies offered easily the multiplex entry fee's worth of value
If you couldn't see at least some of those in your local World of Cine, you're living somewhere very very odd
I went to see MI4 Saturday. My first trip to the theater in more than a year. After paying $20 for 2 tickets and $15 for concessions, 15 minutes into the movie a family sat down behind us and proceeded to talk to each other and to crunch the loud snacks they smuggled into the theater. We moved, but we could still hear them. Totally ruined the whole experience for me and I won't be going back any time soon.
From Redbox, and Dollar theater to Film Festival and 3D prices.
I think a better model would be to change ticket prices depending on availability, cost would go up as the seats diminish. Someone that 'just wants to see a movie' won't clog up a newly opened blockbuster while there will be a seat available for a rabid fan, even though they would pay more.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Prices are not variable because then people might actually start to measure the relative value of movies. This would be a total disaster for the big studios as 99+% of movies are crap.
I come here for the love
Where/when I grew up in Texas, sweetened fizzy water was called "coke". A party host would ask, "What kind of coke do you want?" A perfectly OK answer could be, "Oh, I'll have Sprite."
It's cause all of the studios have colluded to fix the price of movie tickets. I once worked for a theater. You don't get to choose what price you want to sell tickets for, you're told how much you're going to sell them for by the studio/distributor, otherwise they won't send you the film, or they'll pull it out of your theater if you try to change the ticket price. In the past you could chose to sell tickets for a higher price than what you were told, but never lower. I don't know if that's even the case anymore - theaters may not get any leeway in pricing now. This type of practice is supposed to be illegal, but there are loopholes, and Hollywood has deep pockets.
The real variable, and the real constraint, is theater screens. Bad movies have shorter runs and good movies last longer. Price comes in later when you wait for it to show at some local independent theatre, or on PPV, Redbox, etc.
Interesting take. Should the price of a movie ticket directly reflect the cost of producing the picture? Big, exciting, blockbuster, action, spy movie with lots of special effects, ginormous explosions, cool cars and Tom Cruise: price of admission $50.00. Boring, low-budget, independent foreign film with no-name actors and subtitles: price of admission $5.00. Yes, that sounds totally fair. Open up a movie house and charge admission like that and get back to me on how successful you are. Why didn't I think of that?
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38587742
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38587742
That sounds like a boolean condition. Ketchup with fries is good, but fries with ketchup, not so much (although some people like it like that). I agree with the premise, but not to the degree that it is currently implemented and practiced. The whole arument is not moot, it is just more complex.
Because they (most of Hollywood) believe in Socialism.
The scarce resource that you are paying for is the seat not the movie. The movie can be shown as many times as needed for no extra cost (actually maybe not, I don't know how the licensing works), but the theater needs to have space for you to sit, and needs to clean up after you. These costs though are the same independent of which movie you are seeing. This means that a popular movie gets more screenings than an unpopular one rather than a higher ticket price.
If you're going to talk economics, then I have a question for you, not to be snarky, but because I'm genuinely interested in why it would or wouldn't work.
Say you own a theatre and presently charge $10 flat rate for all movies. Why not raise your rate to $15 flat rate? It would cause people not willing to pay that much to see a film to go elsewhere, but there will still be folks willing to pay the higher rate. At some point, the revenues from folks willing to buy a ticket at $10 and the number willing to buy a ticket at $15 may equal out. That is to say, if you raise prices, you'd definitely expect to sell less tickets, right? Of course you would. However, even if you sell less tickets, you're making more per ticket. So let's use easy numbers and say you normally sell 100 tickets per day at $10 per ticket, resulting in $1000 of revenue. Now if you raised the ticket price to $15 per ticket, you may only sell 75 tickets instead of 100, but even though you sold 25 less tickets, you brought in $1125 in revenue.
The point I'm trying to make is that at some point, there may be a price point at which you can maintain your current amount of revenue by serving a lot less people. That means your theatre doesn't need to be as big, you don't need as much staff, don't carry as many maintenance expenses, etc. And perhaps more importantly, the people that are willing to pay more are probably those that are genuinely interested in watching the film, and are therefore (hopefully) less likely to be playing with their cell phones or talking during the movie, which would result in an overall better theater experience.
Food for thought, anyway.