Honestly I'm expecting the whole industry to crash hugely. I've received so many free cinema tickets to mainstream cinemas in the past 3 years that I haven't once actually paid to see anything by a major studio in that time, and I'm someone who goes to the cinema once a week on average.
Much like MoviePass I assume _someone_ is paying for all those trips I go on for free, and when they stop paying I'm not going to go anywhere near 90% of those films. Meanwhile the specified prices of cinema tickets have grown and grown to the point that I'm honestly appalled when I hear how much people go to see such and such a new blockbuster on release day.
And on the TV side of things Netflix seem focused on making consumable content over anything that endures. I can't think of any shows of theirs that're going to age as well as HBOs finest have and I can see that being an issue in the long term when they don't have these kind of pillars to fall back on.
It all seems focused on hyping people up into subscribing and then hoping that they forget about the subscription cost indefinitely.
One of the most frustrating things for me regarding ticket prices is that no theatres in my hometown (Winnipeg, Manitoba) offer matinee pricing anymore.
I'm guessing this is possibly because of the Cineplex monopoly since they bought out Famous Players.
I get so pissed off with paying $16 to see a movie by myself in an empty auditorium during the day when it used to be $8 a seat. What happened to supply and demand?
As for the whole Netflix = consumable content thing, I completely agree. Maybe they come up with a good first season because of big data... there's no overall plan where to take the story and usually the follow up seasons are terrible.
Look at a show like Santa Clarita Diet- I'm positive that show had absolutely no idea how to explain anything or how to wrap it up.
Yikes, $16, that's terrible. Movies in Cambridge, MA (includes many indie and foreign selections) can be had for $9 if you go to a matinee, or buy in books of 25, or patronize a local restaurant. They also have give away free ticket giveaways about once a month. The theater on the opposite side of town has a $4.75 matinee every Tuesday.
When I was a kid in the mid 70s movies cost $3.00 in the Midwest. Westegg says that inflation is up 10x since then. Any movie less than $20 is actually a bargain. However, my dad's salary was 7,000x a movie ticket (Midwest CS professor before salaries exploded).
When I was a kid in the 90's, I could see a movie for $1.50 in the evenings or $1 for a matinee ... in the midwest. They weren't first run movies, but rather movies that were in between their time in the movies and when they went to video. I'm guessing a few of them might have been on HBO during that time frame, but it really didn't matter.
Some years later, that theater quit doing the second run movies and switched to regular movies. I feel kind of lucky that it was after I moved away and had basically quit going to theaters anyway.
I'd probably go more often if things were of similar cheapness. The low cost also meant that I'd be more willing to see comedies and take chances on other movies that don't truly benefit from a large screen and sound system. I also wasn't all that out of sorts if the movie wasn't very good since even at that time, it wasn't much money.
I truly think the advantage of movies in the 70's and early 80's was the lack of popular home video. If you didn't see the movie, you missed out. And I think that helped afford somewhat higher prices, though they didn't need to charge less for second showings as they used to do (Disney cartoons, for example).
You make some interesting points regarding the current exhibition business. Before, Hollywood had a monopoly over the cinemas. Between 70 to 90 per cent of ticket sales would go to the studio of the film, hence the expensive food.
But, when the industry switched to digital projectors, the studios offered the VPF (virtual print fee) where cinemas got to keep a big chunk of the ticket sales to offset the cost of the projectors.
You could equip a 35mm film booth for as little as $7500 using old gear. Brand new was about $50,000 while digital projectors debuted at $100,000 and up.
Now, the theatres are keeping more of the ticket sales (50-70%) and they're charging for all sorts of "innovations" or upgrades (3D, ultra giant screens, fake IMAX screens, Dolby Atmos sound). All in 20-year-old multiplexes from the late-90's/early-00's expansion boom.
Did you have to pay a surcharge for stadium seating? Surround sound? Cupholders? No.
I think the current cinema chains are ripe for disruption.
I still see movies for $6 a pop in central Massachusetts. (They just recently increased their price from $5.) You can't see movies there when they first come out, but they serve beer and cheap burgers.
The main one is my health insurance, which consistently gives me a free cinema ticket ever fortnight (was every week) for walking distances I'd've walked anyway.
Mubi gives me free cinema tickets each week to a designated film.
My phone network gave free ones occasionally for a while too, have switched networks since but I believe they still do.
Those tickets are all paid through the services you are mentioning though. The health insurance, the phone network and Mubi don't get those tickets for free. You do pay a fraction of the tickets through those subscriptions, and a lot of people are paying this fraction too but whithout taking advantage of those tickets, so actualy spending money on movie theatre tickets not even knowing it :)
Maybe I phrased it poorly but that was my point. It's free to me but when it comes to box office numbers they can still claim record breaking figures partially off the back of it. As far as the economics stand right now everything is going good but this kind of thing will have a long term knock on effect towards the perceived value of a trip to the cinema.
These companies won't endlessly do that, there's weird stuff going on with the numbers to prop up the unsustainable cinema prices and it isn't going to last.
I'd say the industry is increasingly reliant on opening weekend hypefests leading to crazy preorder rates too, which actually might hold up even though I find it grim for wholly different reasons.
And on the TV side of things Netflix seem focused on making consumable content over anything that endures. I can't think of any shows of theirs that're going to age as well as HBOs finest have and I can see that being an issue in the long term when they don't have these kind of pillars to fall back on. It all seems focused on hyping people up into subscribing and then hoping that they forget about the subscription cost indefinitely.