The casual moviegoer is a thing of the past. That's a big problem for Hollywood
The casual moviegoer is a thing of the past. That's a big problem for Hollywood
Gone are the days where prospective moviegoers would roll up to the theaters and gawk at the board for their next watch. Theaters are trying to make up that business in other ways.
You're viewing a single thread.
When a new cinema opened in my city back in december 2022, I got an unlimited movie pass. That allows me to see every movie I want, as often as I want. It costs 20 euros per month.
If you want to see a movie a few times a year, the cinema is expensive. Individual tickets can be up to 16 euros here, plus snacks and drinks.
But if you want to see ALL the movies, well, it’s surprisingly cheap by comparison. I really only need to see 2 movies per month to make the pass viable. But I’m not seeing 2 per month - I’m seeing at least two, three per week. I’ve done three movies back to back.
So the trick to casual movie going is: go see everything :D
I thought theaters were going bankrupt after offering those unlimited passes. They banked on people getting the pass and maybe using it once or twice.
There was a company called MoviePass that did go bankrupt because they were basically paying people to go to movies.
They didn't negotiate deals with the theater chains or movie studios to give discounts to their members in exchange for more total customers. The studios want to sell more tickets and the theaters want to sell more popcorn, after all. No, what they did was basically issue people debit cards that could only be used at movie theaters. Customers would pay a flat monthly fee and then MoviePass would pay full price for as many movie tickets as the customers wanted.
Their business model relied on most of their customers under-utilizing the service like a gym membership. That's the only way it would have worked. No one would pay for the service if it didn't at least theoretically save them money, "I can watch 10 movies for the price of 7", and the thing is most of their customers fully utilized their service. People who go to the movies a lot were the only one who heard about it.
People loved movie pass. It was great, for them. Not remotely sustainable though.
Yeah it was wonderful of them to use venture capital to send so many people to the movies.
Yeah, in the US they really scaled back those movie pass programs. I’m in the Netherlands though.
I honestly don’t care how the economics of it work. But I’m using that pass to the fullest extent possible. I’ve seen a hundred and one movies this year so far, so about 110 or so total. That works out to two per week or 8 per month. So I’m getting my money’s worth for sure.
I do buy the occasional popcorn or a drink, but certainly not every movie.
I know in the US they figured that pass use would drop off after the initial period. Much like how gyms are packed in january, but by march those people have stopped coming. Of course, they apparently missed the fact that going to the movies is actually fun. Going to the gym isn’t (for most people).