The new big idea to save movie theaters — albeit one that came and went almost as quickly it was proposed — is to let the millennials text. AMC’s new CEO, Adam Aron, briefly suggested yesterday that it’s the inability to annoy the people around you that’s driving millennials away from movie theaters before public outcry made him walk back the statement.
As a lifelong filmgoer, though, I doubt it. I’m in theaters on a regular basis and, yeah, there’s the occasional jerk with a glowing screen, but usually the phones go away when the lights go down. It’s a small handful of people with no courtesy, not the majority of millennials.
Really, if you’re wondering why millennials aren’t showing up at the movies, the reason is right there at the box office: The price of a ticket. Where I live, the closest chain theater charges $13 a seat for a 2D showing. The average cost of an HD movie purchase on Amazon is $15, and a rental is $4 to $5. So if it’s not a movie I need to see in the theater, or it’s a movie where I know I’m going to see it quite a bit… is saving $2 really worth it?
There’s not the only financial cost, but also the time cost. You have to get to the theater, and you have to get there at an appointed time, or even earlier, if you want to see trailers or just get a decent seat in most theaters. And provided you don’t sneak in snacks, you’ll be paying a substantial markup on soda, popcorn, and other food. Millennials aren’t exactly rolling in cash, and $20 can get you six beers, a pizza and a movie rental fairly easily.
Movie theaters are in a difficult spot, one they’ve been in for a while and which is only getting worse. On the one hand, you have Hollywood, which offers as its most valuable product the marketing campaigns that put butts in seats for movies. As marketing costs have gone up, studios have demanded more and more of what theaters make at the box office; it can run as high as 90% of the opening weekend, dropping 10% each weekend thereafter, depending on the movie.
Meanwhile, the rise of home streaming has meant you don’t even need to leave the house to watch everything from arthouse classics to recent movies that came and went before you got out to see them. And Hollywood, which makes real money off home video and digital sales, is pushing home video releases closer and closer to the theatrical release date.
The response has been to keep squeezing the audiences still willing to show up. This is why Hollywood has focused wall-to-wall superhero movies and “event” pictures; more and more, they’re the only movies that can get people into theaters. And it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to keep showing up to theaters week after week.
There are other ways of doing things. Drafthouse, for example, is essentially a high-end restaurant that screens movies, and makes a point of finding movies you literally can’t see anywhere else and distributing them exclusively to Drafthouse’s theaters. It’s also famous for booting rude people from theaters, to the point where they’ll turn angry voicemails they get about being thrown out of the theater for being rude into anti-texting PSAs. It’s a boutique model that works for smaller theaters and chains, although it remains to be seen whether it’s sustainable on a larger scale. But it’s unlikely selling beer and better food is going to save the multiplex at the mall.
Currently, movie theaters are trying to merge their way out of this problem, but sooner or later, they’re going to have to do one of two things. The first is frankly the least likely: They’ll have to stop showing Hollywood movies until Hollywood gives them a better deal on the box office, or even just get off the Hollywood circuit altogether and cater to niche populations like local immigrant communities and college students.
The second, unfortunately, is to close down screens and turn filmgoing into something only the affluent do. As you can tell from ticket prices, this is already happening, and it’s particularly bad in some urban centers. More than a decade ago, Curtis Hanson noted that in order for the people who served as extras and cast in 8 Mile to go see that Eminem movie, they’d have to go out to the suburbs, a problem that’s only gotten worse. And if a major theater chain goes under, or is even just forced to sell off theaters, a rise of ticket prices past the point of no return seems all but inevitable.
I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. The fundamental power of filmgoing is that it’s a shared experience. Seeing a great movie in a theater with other people is a feeling that’s almost impossible to replicate anywhere outside of a concert venue or a comedy club; film, like TV and music, is a shared cultural experience that lets us bridge divides and find common ground with people we may not fully be able to relate to otherwise. Losing that would be a genuine blow, artistically and culturally, and it’s not something that can be prevented by letting the millennials text.
