Cinemas around here have started showing old films and I have rediscovered the joy of going to the movies, whether it's Some Like It Hot or Suicide Club.
same! in the last couple of years i've seen these movies in a cinema: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, La Heine, Apocalypse Now, HEAT. and i already bought tickets for Run Lola Run, Clerks and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. it's especially cool as someone who's young and wasn't even born when some of these movies initially came to cinemas. at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i…
I love Lola rennt so much. Really a one-of-a-kind movie.
When you grow up it's not only nostalgia, but the feeling that most of the ideas are really not new. I remember watching 'You Were Never Really Here', that had a huge hype behind it, and thinking "I have seen this same exact movie a hundred of times".
But aren't they pricing based on how much it costs to show the film? 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.
It makes no sense from a classical economics perspective to keep the theater empty. Even if no one is buying at the break-even price, it can make sense to sell below cost just to recoup some of the investment - and adjust the investment in the future, of course. 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 b…
I guess it depends on who gets paid for the movie being shown, and who gets paid when a ticket is sold.
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.
I have an alternative in this for Alamo Drafthouse. It sends me alerts as soon as new movies are listed, typically before promoted or announced online.
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.
(If you want alerts just contact me with your email and location - info in bio)
To me this suggests that theater’s are at least partially incorrectly pricing things which explains why they are struggling.
But aren't they pricing based on how much it costs to show the film? 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.
I used to work at a VUE, my flatmate was a manager. I always complained about the awful, awful films we showed with no one watching them. Surely it'd be better to show some classics that would sell?
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.
To me this suggests that theater’s are at least partially incorrectly pricing things which explains why they are struggling.
I was the only person in the theater when I saw Phenomenon, 30 years ago. I’m sure the movie business isn’t a healthy ecosystem right now, but the existence of empty showings isn’t new.
Love this concept.
- If it could give me a near to showtime notifications to help me decide if it's a true empty screenings. That would be great.
- If it connect with my Google Calendar for schedule, it would be amazing.
The only film I saw in an empty theater was 'The Death of Stalin'. That was kind of odd but a decent film regardless.
On the one hand Its fun to watch movies alone on a big screen. My area of NJ apparently could care less about movies like Knock Down The House(Biography of AOC and other house candidates), Navalny (Movie about the murdered politician opposing Putin), The Imitation Machine: Movie about Alan Turing or Last Night in Soho (A wonderful Edgar Wright thriller) On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to…
This is a bit off topic, but I occasionally used to sleep on the sofa in our first floor office in an old Georgian building in Fitzrovia. One occasion when I did that, I woke up at about 3.30 am with intense red light flooding through all the rear windows and the sound of loads of people chattering in the street out front, which seemed as busy as it normally would be in the daytime. I rushed to the front windows and looked down onto a street full of people, but all in 60s get up. I was still half asleep and panicked by the red light and it was totally disorientating to see a busy street of retro Londoners. I actually felt briefly nauseous but I went to the back windows and shaded my eyes, from the crazy glare from two arrays of red spotlights, which it turned out Edgar Wright was using to bounce light off our building, onto the cobbles below ...and began to understand what was going on. Was a relief to get a full explanation, for what had briefly felt like a weird time leap, when I went downstairs and chatted to the extras hanging around out front. The few seconds of woozy, confusion I spent in 1960s london seemed particularly appropriate when I saw Last Night in Soho a year or so later.