It’s true, I didn’t want to pay over $14 for one person to go to the theater. If the prices were reasonable I’d be there.
Appetite for movie theaters? Sure.
Appetite for overpriced tickets, garbage movies, snacks at 1200% market prices and 30 minutes of ads? No thanks.
I pay 6€ for cinema tickets and just don’t buy any snacks and drinks. The fact that you can’t pause the movie, or check your phone, is worth it for me, I just get distracted too easily when watching movies at home. And ads are easy to avoid by just showing up 20 minutes late.
I do avoid big Hollywood productions mostly though, and try to stick to indie productions or documentaries.
The only major annoyance I have is that I frequently get patted down because they assume I’m smuggling in my own food from outside
get patted down because they assume I’m smuggling in my own food from outside
If my local theaters did this I would never return. Its not a fucking airport.
If my local airports did this I would never return. Its not a fucking church.
You go to a church that does patdowns? Where’s the faith?
I have faith that I’ll get to receive a patdown.
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Yeah our theater is so understaffed that they hardly ever check for tickets. Matinees are still affordable once in a while at around $10.
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Hollywood churns out mostly dogshit quality movies, reboots, and sequels, of which a single ticket is around $20.
A family of 4 could easily spend over $100 just to see one mediocre movie.
Either Hollywood movie studios works with theaters to change that reality, or theaters die, and studios get acquired by streamers without any fear of antitrust to hold them back.
The only change I can see them making is increasing their ticket and concession prices.
Theatres aren’t helping with their inane markups.
It’s almost like people don’t want to pay $20 to sit down in a squeaky, sticky room with a dozen strangers who are invariably inconsiderate assholes, to see the 17th remake of some hit from the 80s. And throw in another $10 if you want a bag of popcorn, $12 for a drink, or trade-in of your vehicle for a box of Milk Duds that actually contains a completely unnecessary plastic bag of Milk Duds to fill the space otherwise occupied by 5 or 6 chunks of candy.
Especially when we’re all just rolling in cash from this new tariff money. Like, what else are we gonna spend that kind of money on - 600mg of ibuprofen from the ER visit where you rolled / suspected broke your ankle??
Leo should love Blu-rays.
You can actually own them, and they’re 19 years old.Nothing about the movie theater experience draws me in anymore. The exception being Alamo Drafthouse. Last time I went to a Regal theater they had legitimately 15 to 20 minutes of straight up fucking commercials before the showing, before the trailers. I’m already paying out the ass for the ticket and food and you’re still showing me commercials? Nah. That alone is enough to turn me off to it. Alamo Drafthouse on the other hand may be a little more pricey, but it’s god great food and drinks and no fucking ads. They also have a high respect for no talkers in the theater and adults only on most showings or require an adult with them. End rant.
Alamo Drafthouse FTW
I’m always taken aback by people who complain about the leading ads. Been going to movies 20-minutes late for over 20-years. Yet everyone acts surprised and annoyed that ads lead in.
But yeah, I’d love an Alamo around here. We had a place with $1 movies. You could eat and drink, move your chairs around, all that. :(
My gripe, at least with amc is that the ads/trailers start at the “showtime” and are still 30 mins. The “showtime” should be when the actual movie starts. I show up 25-30 mins after posted time to skip most ads. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’d honestly prefer a trailer free movie experience.
Legitimately it may have been that I missed when they decided to make that change as I hadn’t been to a mainstream theatre in years and took my kids to see something.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Nolan (another theater advocate) should come to a rural town and watch a third-run movie on a screen that feels barely bigger than your living room TV. Sure, it’s like 10 times bigger, but between that, the Coke stuck to the ground, the popcorn stuck to the Coke, and the sticky stuff on your seat you hope is Coke… I think they’d agree that most Americans are just fine watching movies at home. They go to these exclusive, high class theaters with the best of everything and they think we can all get an experience like that. We can’t.
I don’t care about artsy-fartsy movies or Marvel/superhero movies (or Avatar). I mean both are okay, I don’t hate them or anything, but I’m not generally going out of my way to see them. (I did see last year’s Superman on IMAX. Even though I don’t like Superman, I knew that would be a unique experience, and I was right.) I like indie movies that fit a certain niche, and I like Japanese movies (especially anime movies, like stuff from Shinkai and Hosoda). I try to support these movies, but usually we get like, the worst screen. It’s fine, we used to have to drive for hours to get the worst screen. Now we can get the worst screen just up the road. I support the films marketed to me and my niche. I’m not gonna spring for every DiCaprio or Nolan movie, they usually make a billion dollars anyway. I have no sympathy for the occasional one that doesn’t.
Not even 3 weekends in. It looks like, now follow me here, it looks like people are willing to pay for spectacle they can’t duplicate at home.
(Source: boxofficemojo.com)
Compared to this entire 13 week run:
Nothing against the latter, but I saw the trailers and was like “Yeah, I can watch that at home.”
I would argue that seeing One Battle After Another in IMAX 70MM definitely is an experience I can’t reproduce at home and was amazing btw. Unfortunately most people don’t have the opportunity to see it that way.
Remove the 1st hour and I agree. It was way too long and the mom’s story i feel like could’ve been told as dialogue.
The closest 70mm imax to me is not even on my continent
To clarify, there are 70mm imax cinemas on my continent, but they happen to be even further away
of course he knows that, big action movies have always sold more tickets.
“We’re looking at a huge transition. First, documentaries disappeared from cinemas. Now, dramas only get finite time and people wait to see it on streamers.
I wouldn’t limit it to big action movies, but yeah, if I’m spending $20 to $50 to sit in a theater, I want spectacle.
If I want people sitting around in rooms speaking dramatically to each other, I can see that on PBS for free. 😉
PBS is not free.
The amount of my taxes going to PBS is insignificant.
Trump ended all that. Gardening shows are too radical left.
He’s just pissed that his painted gold crap keeps getting rejected by Antiques Roadshow.
Quality of Hollywood films is the main reason people avoid theatres. No one is paying those prices to watch 11% rotten tomatoes films.
There are films I get angry with even after torrenting.
Tron: Ares has entered the chat. Wtf was that trash
Yeah, if the cost of seeing a movie for my family of 4 is $80, if instead of going to the movies I take that and save for a TV, staying at home 4-5 times gets me a 75 inch 4K TV.
If I’m going to watch some unimaginative retread of an established IP, I’d rather do it on my couch, drinking a beer, and eating my own popcorn.
My wife and I used to go to the movies every Tuesday for like $5 a ticket. Didn’t matter if there was something we were really interested in, we would take the chance on something. If that price tracked with inflation, it’d be $7 a ticket and we’d probably go with kids a couple times a month still. But it’s more than double that and so are the snacks, so we instead go maybe twice a year.
But, yeah, some executive with an MBA knows best how to price empty goddamn seats.
I’d pay thrice the price if seating was good, volume was 75% of current levels, talking was policed, Mary Jane was finger banged in a car instead of the row behind me, popcorn weren’t thrown around, phones were off, commercials didn’t last 25 minutes before the main showing started, I could press pause and go to the bathroom or for a snack.
Everything you said was completely reasonable and actually practiced in many theaters except that last part.
I was definitely being facetious 😄
My point is partly that not only do cinemas have to deal with managing all these people in there, they also have to compete with significantly better AV setups in people’s homes. Screens are much bigger, OLED, with surround sound at home. And at home I CAN press pause.
When cinemas were a big thing, people were lucky and wealthy if that had a 40” plasma at home. Now, you can get a 55” screen for the price of taking the family to a cinema 4 times.
That’s a very valid point. I think it’s more about the experience of going there with your friends, ordering popcorn etc.
I’ve been to the cinema alone, but that’s usually only if I reeeally want to see the movie ASAP and it’s not out anywhere else in the seven seas (if you know what I mean). Other than that it’s always been about going there with friends. Kind of like music festivals - I enjoy them for every reason except the music part :D (with exceptions)
I can’t take the commercials after paying 50 bucks. This is why I only attend rep cinemas. They once tried to project a single commercial and a large group of us pounded on the door of the now ex manager.
Theatres are meant to be places to watch movies, and movies are an art form. The garbage Hollywood is putting out these days is designed-by-committee bullshit. Not art. So yeah, theatres will probably die because they’re not making art anymore.
I’m not sure I understand this take. Are you specifically talking about Hollywood vs. indies? I would consider PTA a part of Hollywood and I thought One Battle After another was fantastic. Same for people like Zach Cregger, Yorgos Lanthimos, or Danny Boyle.
My local theatre shows some new artsie movies. We go to see them, and some are great.
But the theatre is usually close to empty.
I don’t think expunging the bland, mass market movies would save theaters, even if they did.
His newest flick was excellent and it bombed, so there’s some disconnect here. I think it suffered a Shawshankian fate though.
I might be in the minority but I actually really, really enjoy the movie theater experience. I just can’t afford it more than every so often.
I saw a movie 2 days ago, it cost 34 dollars for 2 tickets and was preceeded by over 25 minutes straight of ads before any trailers. Leo is completely out of touch, and I don’t think anybody asked him for his fucking opinion on this in the first place.
Leo wouldn’t be able to compute what 34 Dollars mean to people in the first place.
That’s like a whole banana?
Let’s see…fight traffic, find parking, crazy price, uncomfortable seating, can’t control the heating or cooling, can’t lower the volume or turn it up, can’t stand up and sing along, can’t text or take a call, can’t pause for bathroom break, can’t rewind cuz you missed that one part, it’s too big or too far became of seating, other people are doing X thing, a crazy person may end your life after or during a shitty movie you were invited to, ticket master and ticket slave relationship…yeah no appetite.
don’t forget 30 minutes of ads AFTER the showtime.
Except when you come late on purpose and the ads are shorter this time around.
They also started making everything reserved seating. I used to go spontaneously to the movie theater when I was bored. Then they started the erosion with the “luxury” theaters where they served food and drink to your seat, and then it became run-of-the-mill theaters that wanted you to pre-purchase tickets using fandango or whatever and select seating assignments before even arriving.
I’m just not going to tolerate the same bullshit with the movies that I find barely tolerable to attend concerts and other live events. It’s not that great an experience. It’s a fucking movie. And nowadays, they’re usually streaming a week after theater release.
disagree, reserved seating is the one good thing that has happened with cinemas in the last 20 years. completely saves you from having to arrive early to ensure you get a good seat.
