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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.


if it is free you are the product

Cinemas show so many ads I would not be surprised playing movies is just a side gig.




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