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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?"
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.....
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.
I have never seen 2 2d movies at the same cinema at different prices.
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.
It occurs to me, however, that determining the optimal price might be rather difficult: it probably varies from cinema to cinema, movie to movie, time of day, and "age" of movie (that is, the optimal price for a new movie is probably different than that same movie a month later). Since most of the money is made in the first couple of weeks, there's not much time to gather statistics, analyze them, and do all the necessary number-crunching.
Also, in many cinemas it would be fairly easy to defeat the system: buy a ticket for the cheapest movie listed, then sneak into the theater for the movie you actually want to see. Policing this might cost more than the additional profit.
I'm pretty sure it would work like wine - people would avoid the cheap ones.
I see a serious flaw in your reasoning. Bronco Wines (makers of Two Buck Chuck) sell more wine than any other California winery, especially ones like Opus One and Silver Oak; Yellow Tail Wines sell more wine than all other Australian wineries combined.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I can't remember where I heard it, so I have no proof, but the story I heard goes like this:
... they tend to have standardized prices. Such a practice would not be so common if there weren't very compelling reasons.
They tried, years ago in a trial run somewhere. Customers hated it. Why? A few reasons: One, marking down the price sends the message "this movie sucks!" whether it's true or not, and nobody will go to see it. Two, people will feel like you're extorting them by charging more for the good movies (just like Coca-Cola found out when they decided they could add thermometers to Coke machines and charge more when it was really hot out).
Three, people LIKE it being predictable that a movie always costs X; it turns out in fact people don't like having to do complicated 'well would movie A be worth $10, or should I see movie B instead for $%' calculations. This makes the decision-making much more complicated than "which of these movies do I want to see".
A great many media have discovered more or less the same thing. DVDs, books, audio CDs, movies, video games
If those people are too thrifty to suffer the complete movie theatre financial dick-punck, maybe they're not in the theatre in the first place. Maybe they're at home, grabbing the latest cams and eating cardboard flavoured store-brand popcorn and watery store-brand cola.
How many times have I looked at a theatre's "now showing" list for 10 minutes before deciding there wasn't anything worth seeing for $13 ? Even for blockbuster titles, I have a hard time justifying the expense unless I'm truly psyched about the movie, because the last time a movie gave me $13.worth of entertainment was 1998. I've watched several hundred movies since then, but they just fall short of expectations, very short.
Today's writers just don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore, it's all these ADD-afflected JJ Abrams types who can't juggle a single idea in their head long enough to carry it through. Few movies are either fun or thought-provoking from start to finish, the great majority are cheap whores that quite literally cram 90 seconds worth of punchy trailer material inside a hastily-edited snooze sandwich, with a "what-the-fuck" ending you can see coming before you even set foot inside the lobby. Poster with a guy and some chick staring into the distance ? SHE'S GONNA LOSE HER BABY (then get it back). There, I'm a fuckin' writer now, where's my goddamned Prius and Vitamin Water ?
I would love to see figures for unfilled seats, because most of the times I've been to the theatre, a week or two after release, there have been maybe 30-50 seats filled out of 600+, so it seems there's a big mindless rush on opening night, and then nothing for the remainder of the 6 to 12 week run. Six shows a day, and even if you rolled them all up into one, you'd still be half-empty. I'm not saying they should expect to sell out every show, every day, but 35% occupancy is usually a good baseline for other entertainment venues. How much money are they throwing down the drain with these shows nobody watches ?
If I look at indie theatres, they're packed four nights a week. Tickets are $6 to $8, popcorn and a large soda for $7, and they rarely screen garbage because with a single screen, they have to make it good or else they're going to bleed money that week. Okay, so the latest blockbuster probably won't be screened here until 4-6 weeks after its first run, but what do I care ? Do I need to watch MI4 right this freakin' second ? The megaplexes need to take a clue from the little guys and go back to a moviegoer-centric model, instead of their current role as Hollywood's captive gimp. Give US what WE want, and tell Hollywood to shape up or slip out. There are hundreds of thousands of films out there, spanning over a century, and a few of them are even worth seeing. Even if they stopped making movies forever, theatres could show old stuff and bring in audiences. I would absolutely love to see some 80's and 90's favorites on the big screen; hell I'd even pay to see Hardware with a bunch of B-movie dorks cheering on the bad robot, or bizarro classics like Spider Baby. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's good.
-Billco, Fnarg.com