Whereas i often pause movies i watch at home to create an intermission. One of the benefits of watching at home.
My local AMC has one of the screens set up for dinner and drinks, and I’ve watched a movie there once. I didn’t really like the mix. Similar to @HMS_Irruncible , i found that chicken fingers interfered with my enjoyment of the movie, and the movie didn’t particularly help the chicken fingers. So i haven’t done that again. It’s funny, because i like a popcorn or a box of chocolates with the movie. But i guess those are more unambiguously finger foods.
Anyway, other than that time i bought a whole dinner, i never buy drinks at the movies. It’s not even that i need to pee, it’s just not something i particularly want. So i wouldn’t have alcoholic drinks, either.
I always buy, or sneak in, a box of raisinettes at the movies. I’ve being doing that religiously for the past 60 years at least. You can eat them quietly without disturbing anybody else. When you find something that works, you stick with it.
In the UK. Could but rarely do. Expensive and beer runs straight through me. Even so, if I’m watching an indulgent 3 hour movie I’ll try and find out when a good time to go is.
Back in the 90s, when it was not the norm, there was a theater in Anchorage where you could get a beer and have a meal delivered to you. Each row in the theater was separated by a long table. I almost never go to the theater nowadays, so my answer would be “no”.
Robert Redford bought a failing mall cineplex in our town, and turned it into a good theater with a great snack bar.
Really good sandwiches, yogurt parfaits, a wide assortment of gourmet mini-pizzas… I was so excited that I could get a beer that it became part of my ritual there. Went well with the excellent popcorn covered in real butter…
(Annnd, he sold it to a theater chain that robbed it of all its charm, and it’s closed now. Where have you gone, Roy Hobbs?)
My father did something similar once, about thirty years ago, on a vastly smaller scale. He bought an old (and closed) cinema in a two-horse Colorado mountain down, added a small, but quality ice cream service and good (NY style) deli. Everyone (well, that I spoke with, and probably some were being generous) loved it, as otherwise they were driving over 40 miles to the nearest theater.
But it barely broke even. Margins on all of the higher quality food were minimal, the town was too used to going to the bigger town for a day of shopping + a movie, and didn’t want to settle for a much smaller screen that the old theater could support, and a ton of people snuck food and drinks in rather than pay the higher price of concessions (and no, theaters get pennies on the dollar for actual ticket sales).
So he sold it and a few years later, it was gone. And that was in the VHS tape era, not in the later DVD era (I’ll wait till it comes out on DVD) much less the streaming era!
I probably wouldn’t, but now that I think about it, I don’t know why not? I mean, if I’m watching live theater in a venue where it’s acceptable to have a drink while watching the show, I’ll usually have one (especially at Atlanta Shakespeare, where it’s practically obligatory). So, I don’t know what the difference is, but I guess I just don’t associate being in a movie theater with drinking alcohol, and I’d probably assume, rightly or not, that any beer sold there wouldn’t be very good anyway.