Of course you can still do that with the surviving "all you can eat" plans, but they're way more expensive and aren't quite as generous.
Unlimited movies and they ate the entire cost? They didn't arrange any special deals or anything - they just paid the full price of the movie. It was insane.
On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to care enough about these topics. Instead the latest superhero movie is next door packed to the brim and is so loud it rattles the walls to the room playing my quiet documentary with only me sitting inside watching it. :/
And if I even accept this, the people in the choice seats invariably show up right when all the trailers are wrapping up.
so - people buy tickets ahead of time, and it might be the only way to watch it from a reasonable seat.
This probably doesn't apply to off-hours like tuesday afternoon or whatever.
Even our small independent theater in town has reserved seats, some of which are couches.
The "box office" is not even really a thing anymore at most theaters. And the single person you talk to inside that is the "box office" just uses the same system you can reserve seats yourself on your own time?
Pretty much every theater is reserved seating these days. Why would I risk showing up last minute on a whim and end up in a horrible seat near the front of the screen?
Occasionally I have a "private screening" where I'm the only one in the auditorium. The most recent example was "The Mummy". I hadn't fully thought throught the implications of watching a horror movie alone in the middle of a darkened 65-seat auditorium!
There's another town a few miles away where a similar cinema has both assigned seating and 20 minutes of adverts before the movie.
On the European Cinema network [0], reserved seats is a long gone concept.
So not always a given that seats can be reserved online for cinema, depends on ones location.
So yea, location dependent.
I’m old and have always pre-purchased tickets, even in the 90s, as that’s the way to get better seats.
In Switzerland the seats have always been numbered and even if the cinema is empty people wouldn't dare move into another seat. People do show up right before the film starts and try to avoid the ads. Some also hang in the lobby until the film actually starts.
And the online process shows you which seats are already filled and I base my decision on that when there is assigned seating. One thing peculiar is that the theatres are not often as filled as the seat map shows, makes me think that an even newer generation of the movie ticket subscribers (AMC A-List) are reserving seats and changing plans
But, I love the idea of a theater almost entirely to myself.
The theaters were never full. So it was basically just like watching a movie in your own living room. Yeah, except maybe for the handful of strangers that were there to watch with you.
It sometimes feels wrong to only pay €25 after watching so many movies. So I make up for it by buying things from the cinemas.
Back in the heyday, I used to work in a startup devoted to the cinema world, where with one app you could buy tickets for all cinemas - even those that did not "officially" support it.
Among them were arthouse theaters in Hamburg, which I often used for testing, as most of the time reserving a few seats would not matter as they would be empty, at least during the day. Some of them had projections of old movies, and I was like "if I lived there, I'd go every day".
Ironically, now I live between 2 art cinemas in my city and rarely go to any of them :)
but you could always be sure that the old lady loudly crunching on every.single.crisp. was there in the showing as well
Cons: have to watch arthouse.
Meanwhile if I watch at home then there's half a century of classics that I haven't gotten around to watching yet.
We got to small talk and the lady mentioned she had once been the only customer for a showing and told the projectionist that she didn’t want to be a bother and could come back and another day.
The projectionist had apparently replied that it was no bother - they would roll the movie even if no one showed up!
Not to mention that film rolls do wear out overtime.
Maybe. Depends.
I’m sure I’ve heard of the low cost carriers cancelling flights that are under-sold at the last minute.
Would make sense if the destination has fewer tickets sold from there.
I'm unsure exactly how the deals with local businesses running ads before the movies are set up, but I could imagine that you're supposed to be running the ads an agreed upon number of times, regardless of ticket sales.
Sometimes in the daytime we would get retirees who would watch a movie and basically loiter around, and occasionally ask if they could catch the end of a different movie running in an empty hall. You'd sometimes let a regular crash an empty screening like this if they bought an extra snack or coffee for it or something.
I had to go to the cinema 3 times, because they would not do a projection for less than 5 people.
Theaters are struggling because they need the working class to attend, and the working class has no money. This is true for any non-essential business that depends on 90% of the people.
To find new ways of extract money may help a little, but in the end the basic economics do not add up.
Which in turn is how much the studios and distributors pay to make/market the film?
Which is in turn driven by costs...
Which are basically large bets on if a piece of art will have mass appeal.
Apparently the deal back then was that theatres had to buy films in packages. If you wanted the latest blockbuster, you had to buy a bunch of terrible dross, and commit to showing it X times.
Now, in reality there are second-hand effects, of course - like people getting adjusted to the below-cost ticket prices and being even less incentivized to buy at the normal price.
If it is free to show the movie then there is no penalty to running extra sessions. If it isn't free, someone is being paid. If that is a different someone to where ticket money goes they care more about sessions than viewings.
One or two exceptions - Project Hail Mary, for example.
But the decline of Marvel, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises has been stark.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker has some great commentary on the problem.
Also, a number of other factors:
* massive TVs are cheap now
* people behave disrespectfully in cinemas
* cinema tickets are now unaffordable for the low end of the market
* the experience hasn't modernised and become luxy enough to retain the high end of the market
* streaming services have high budgets now(E.g., you may find the new Dune films too violent, but they were great. And the moral is not very subtle in them. :)
If the theater is full of people talking during the movie or lighting the place up while they’re on their phone (in either case ignoring the movie), then I’d rather be alone.
It seems like more times than not, this is the case.
Very cool idea nonetheless.
Its the norm and its probably why their stock is trading at $1.45 as of this writing.
Its a dead (not dying, dead) entertainment option. When you are competing for the same 24 hrs in a day with TV, Youtube, Gaming, Streaming, TikTok, Instagram and many others the theater is bottom of the barrel for young people today.
And don't tell me its because people are disrespectful or the commercials are too long. These are a problem but Alamo Drafthouse tried to tackle this and they ended up in bankruptcy. AMC would also be bankrupt today but it's saving grace was the meme stock frenzy they had a few years back. Probably bought them a few more years but that ride might be coming to an end.
Currently they fill the rooms for the pop movies like old established franchises but that only comes along every couple weeks at the most and the rest of the time the place is not really busy. This is a bit different in the big cities but AMC has overextended themselves with too many locations in the rural and suburban US.
...Also this app is not displaying accurate data (I assume they are pulling from AMC's API). My local theater is listing no results and I cross checked and there are movies currently listed that have 0 seats booked so the app is counting incorrectly for at least one theater.
EDIT: After I wrote this, the site auto updated with new data. Now I see some screenings but it is still inaccurate because it is still missing movies from that theater...maybe they are scraping instead of using the API? This is a simple problem if using the API (I wrote my own home cooked app): just iterate through all theater ids, find the ones with 0 bookings and display that list.
The last few movies I’ve seen in theaters have not been that. Two of the last 3 movies I’ve seen had audio mixing problems, and dialogue was inaudible in some scenes. (I heard this got fixed later for one of the movies) In all of them, I could hear bass from the adjacent theaters in some scenes. In the last two movies I went to see, both had someone in the audience bring an intermittently crying baby to the movie.
Im done with watching movies in theaters. It’s a better experience to watch at home, with headphones, a blanket, and the ability to pause for bathroom breaks.
Unfortunately since they already filed for bankruptcy a few years back they have had to cut costs and so their system for ordering food replaced (from pen and paper collected and an usher quietly brings you your food to QR code with...a cellphone) people are recently concerned that this has reduced their legendary quality. They still take audio and picture quality very seriously in my experience.
Also where are you located? LA and NYC have legendary theaters that are truly a special treat. Its harder to replicate that in various states but there are still some states trying (ex. NJ being the actual birthplace of the American film industry has a few excellent theaters scattered throughout that dont tolerate poor quality/talkers)
If your story is from AMC theaters just know that you are visiting the Mcdonalds of movie theaters.
It's just dead in its current form, you're right about that. To make it work they need to reinvent themselves. But it's hard.
They are a US national chain and they don't run "commercials" just lots of trailers. They have recently announced that they have extended the trailer runtime from 20-25 mins to 35-40 mins. While this is frustrating they always indicate in the app which movies have the trailers (most do) and the approx length. As a result, patron who want to skip the trailers use the app for guidance and just arrive +35 mins after the showtime. Example: https://i.imgur.com/bsVf6AE.png
Given this system, I dont think AMC has really lost patrons because of the ads since everyone who hates them know exactly how long to delay their entrance to the movie room. It really is the other factor I mentioned (they are not compelling enough most of the time vs other entertainment).
One more aspect I forgot to mention is concession prices. Small popcorn is ~10$, small drink is ~7$ so ~17$ for basic concessions and that does not include ticket price ranging between 5$ on Tuesday special deals for standard definition all the way to $27.99+ for premium screen. If you are going to the movies you might as well watch it on their best screen. It gets expensive if you are bringing family. The reason for this pricing is the studio. They actually take a majority of the ticket revenue and they refuse to lower their percentage of ticket prices on the marquee titles (and also require 2 week minimum contracts in the premium screens even if the movie is a stinker)
The theaters are essentially just popcorn/soda vendors who just happen to show movies on the side.
AMC is also interesting because even in the "real" trailer period they have a long ad for AMC itself but also for Coke, then another for themselves telling you to sign up for the loyalty programs, then another for themselves with Nicole Kidman in the theater with her suit with the silver pinstripes. A little thing for the theater is normal but they're going way overboard with it and it's hard to believe it's really effective.
For $27.99 I can usually get MLB tickets people are dumping last minute (face value starts a few dollars higher) and can always get AAA baseball tickets for less than that.
That dynamism to the pricing helps a lot of people get into the door to those events and I'm sure it helps them milk additional profit out of very interesting games.
I know you say it's the studios setting the price. Why do they seem indifferent to the impending bankruptcy of theaters?
It’s meant I can jump on re-runs etc I really care about (just saw Fight Club last week) - and get the specific seat location I prefer.
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Anyways, the point is that with the advent of big home TVs, streaming, I've virtually stopped going to movie theaters. The experience is always subpar every time I go due to eating noise and talking.
I think you're in the wrong "actually I prefer to be alone in social spaces" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007438
Around here, films from Bollywood show in Telugu, Hindi, Gujarati languages. There are family films in Spanish (those aren’t bad dubs, but parallel scripts and A-list voice actors.) Want to watch a Studio Ghibli film? Here’s the timetable for dubbed; here’s a timetable for subtitles!
There are live video-game tournaments. There are premieres for live operas and symphony orchestra performances that are simulcast around a region.
There are Christian groups who go in to support a film, and they can turn those into fundraisers and evangelization activity.
The auditoriums can be rented out for special events. Big birthday, Kindergarten graduation, Quinceañeras, etc. They will support teleconferencing and businesses can hold seminars or all-hands meetings there.
I suppose that all of these schemes were harmed by the pandemic and lockdowns, but the advertising is still there, and the Hindus are still showing up on public transit.
