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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
Because all the parking spaces are showing the same movie?
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.
Why isn't it cheaper to park at 6 AM and more expensive to park at 9 AM or noon?
...it often *is* cheaper to park at 6am than at 9 or noon ("Early Bird Discount"), at least in Chicago.
In San Francisco, it's not in many locations (at least depending on the size of day), we have something called SFPark. http://sfpark.org/ Garages in New York and SF that I've visited also have similar policies and charge more for SUVs etc.
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.
From what I've read, movie theaters make most of their money from overpriced popcorn and drinks, not movie tickets.
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.....
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.
Even more, they tend to become better... pirate one that you can no longer buy and you'll be paying in zillions for copyright infringement.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
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.
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This is Slashdot, the only acceptable price for a movie is 0 because it doesn't cost anything to copy it.
But ten people in the room versus one doesn't really take THAT MUCH more time to clean, but it does increase concessions revenue by about $90.
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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...
Why does it cost the same to park a big vehicle as to park a small vehicle?
It is more expensive to park an SUV or minivan in many manned garages. It's the unattended ones with the gates where they use uniform prices for what should be an obvious reason.
Why isn't it cheaper to park at 6 AM and more expensive to park at 9 AM or noon?
Most city parking garages seem to have different pricing at different times of day.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
Cost is irrelevant to the price. Rational suppliers will set the price that ensures the biggest revenue, regardless of cost.
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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"?
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.
Right. So I check out digital delivery, and on iTunes, Princess Bride HD is $14.99, Wild Hogs HD is $17.99. SD prices are the same, but back when I first noticed this, Princess Bride SD was cheaper.
Inconceivable!
I think we all know which is the better 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
It is, in fact, very common for parking garages to offer rates that vary through the day, and to offer small vehicle discounts.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
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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!
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.
Why isn't it cheaper to park at 6 AM and more expensive to park at 9 AM or noon?
...it often *is* cheaper to park at 6am than at 9 or noon ("Early Bird Discount"), at least in Chicago.
That's a better question - why do garages offer cheaper all day early-bird pricing if I get there before 9am - even if they are a self-park facility and don't do tandem parking. Most of the time, the discount means that I'd pay less to park from 8am - 5pm than from noon - 5pm.
I can see why a place that does valet parking might give a cheaper early bird rate - they know the early bird customer is likely to stay all day, so they can block that car in with other cars of short-term parkers.
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.
You dont charge different rates for different oranges, figs, corn cons. The definition of a commodity fits most movies.
Gently reply
Costs are unrelated to price, price is unrelated to costs. Suppliers will set the price that maximizes revenue depending on demand. Cost has nothing to do with it.
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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.
.. 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?
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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'
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?
That pisses me off at one of the parking buildings in my city. Its $12.50 early bird parking, entry 6am-9am, exit 2pm-7pm. If I need to leave before 2pm I have to pay $4/hour. It is 100m closer to my office, its elevators don't seem like they're about to fall and its only 50c more than the other building with no exit time limits though.
As a "fringe viewer", I certainly would.
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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).
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.
Yeah, I am going to have to say that would work fine for me. Hollywood blockbusters are not entertaining to me, but the unknown $2 movie might be.
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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/
>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.
People who drive to work downtown every day will presumably lease a monthly space. Who arrives at 8 AM but doesn't do it every day? Someone has a lot of government work to do downtown, or a tourist who wants to put the car in place and leave it there. Who arrives at noon and needs a parking space now? The regional managers who have to get to the 1:00 PM sales meeting at corporate.
Guess which one is more price-sensitive? The manager is going to get reimbursed if he doesn't put it on a corporate card anyway. From the perspective of the garage, the ideal solution is to figure out their daily volume of last-minute driveups and fill all the other spaces with the monthlies and the all-day people. The last-minute driveups will mostly turn over during lunch - they will have either morning or afternoon meetings and will then go somewhere else - and they want the most convenient garage, not the cheapest.
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.
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'
Second run theaters have largely died out due to the advent of home cinema and the film studios pushing up DVD releases. Fifteen years ago, a movie wouldn't be released to the home audience until ten or twelve months after theatrical release. Now, you have things like Deathly Hallows Part 2, the highest-grossing film of the year, being released on DVD four months after it opened nation-wide, only three weeks after it went second-run. And unlike first-run theaters, second-runs will keep kids' films and blockbusters around for months - the theater I used to work at had "Toy Story 2" for ELEVEN months, and it was our best grosser for eight of those months. If the DVD had been released a month into that run, we would have lost a LOT of revenue.
That said, we still have second-run theaters in Cincinnati, though only about half as many as we did fifteen years ago.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
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.
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If you're in the garage from 8-5, you're an employee in the area. Pricing is lower because you're a regular, and you have time to figure out the best deal; with too high a cost, you'd take the bus or bike instead, or park three blocks away and hoof it. If you're in for a shorter time, you're in sales or a visitor. Pricing is higher because you can easier afford to pay extra money than spend time to price-shop the garages. Plus the short-time visitors sometimes come as mobs (the lunch rush, for example), and if you're going to have enough parking available for the lunch crowd, you have to have the spots vacant and not earning any money other parts of the day.
How big of a price discrepancy are you expecting? I see tickets in the $8-$13 range where I live (depending on theater, and 3D is always a few bucks extra). I wouldn't expect the price differential to be any more than $2-$4. Given that, I don't see those ten people—who were only willing to see the movie for a few bucks less—ordering $9 worth of concessions apiece.
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.
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'
In the price there are a lot of costs involved including the coverage for the theater itself. So the part of the ticket that actually pays for the movie is just one part. And a big expensive movie may have more viewers than a small cheap one so the ticket price will even out. If the big movie did cost more then it would have had less viewers.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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).
They do if DRM tells them to...
You are, however, complicit in the act.
Without you doing the downloading, they wouldn't have uploaded it to you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/may/08/marks-and-spencer-bras-facebook
:)
In the UK a well known clothing store tried to charge more for larger cup sizes.. Which to a point makes sense, more fabric, more cost.. except that the cost of production has almost nothing to do with the cost of sale.. you're paying for fancy shops, head offices and analysts who read slashdot in their lunchbreak..
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
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!)
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!
Our local theater has 3 halls of theaters branching off the central concession area. During busier times of the day, each of the three halls has a ticket taker (during less busy times there's just one ticket taker for the whole complex). I suppose they could put the more expensive films in one of those three halls and the cheaper ones in the others, and prevent this sort of behavior.
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.
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."
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.
Alternatively the product is not the Movie but the Theatre Going Experience.
I had a "Theatre Going Experience". The one local theater that still showed second-run movies for $2 (9 screens) was torn down and is now a nearly completed parking garage. Theatre: Gone.
All the theaters here are Marcus. Their website is nearly unusable unless you either know which theater you want to go to or which movie you want to see: no listing of just movies available in your city, and theaters are organized by state which, while listed by full name, are sorted by postal abbreviation.
The marquee on one of their theaters actually tells you "for movie and event info like our Facebook page" and a runtogetherword which is assumedly the name of that Facebook page. You own a theater; you own the marquee of the theater; I'm standing in front of your theater looking at your marquee. You're telling me you can't be assed to list your movie titles on your free-for-you marquee and instead ask me to get on-line and use another company's service to find out what movies you're showing and when? It's not that cold out here. (Then again, they did list a live RiffTracks simulcast on their marquee more than a month in advance, but when the date came around for it, they disavowed any knowledge of the event.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Because they (most of Hollywood) believe in Socialism.
Interesting. The conventional definition of a monopoly says nothing about the overall size of a market changing over time.
Care to tell everyone else why they're all wrong?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.