A couple of relevant facts on this topic:
First, concessions is always the theater’s money maker.
The physical cinema (known in the business as the exhibitor) makes little or no money from ticket sales. Decades ago, they would take a small percentage of opening-weekend sales, sending the majority of ticket revenue back to the company that licensed the movie for exhibition (the distributor). Then, over the subsequent weeks, the proportion of the exhibitor’s take would rise, and the distributor’s cut would fall. If the movie was still playing a few months later, the exhibitor was keeping most or all of the revenue. (This is why you would have second-run movie houses offering heavily-discounted tickets to see six-month-old blockbusters.)
The business has changed a lot over the years. Movies don’t play for months and months any more, so the exhibitor’s cut never rises above a negligible fraction. Also, powerful distributors play hardball with in-demand blockbusters, sometimes demanding 100% of ticket revenue for the opening week. This results in a situation where the exhibitor puts a new release on half its screens, keeps none of the ticket money for 7-10 days, and then dumps the movie from most of its screens in order to bring in the next big new release.
There are a dwindling number of repertory houses which put older library titles on their screens, and therefore make different financial arrangements to exhibit their films. There are also a handful of specialty exhibitors which show foreign and independent movies via smaller distributors that don’t have the same clout as the big studios, so the revenue-sharing model isn’t as harsh.
But for 99+% of the movie business in the U.S., the above arrangement governs. Which means the exhibitor makes all but a tiny fraction of its revenue at the concession counter. It’s a pretty bad business model, for a number of reasons. And it’s why your popcorn and soda will set you back fifteen bucks, because that’s how the cinema owner keeps the lights on.
Anyway, the point is, this helps explain why the concessions sales model is so difficult to change. Margins are razor-thin, with gross revenue barely covering operational costs. If you hire an additional person and divide the labor, with one person at the register and the other person cycling cups through the soda machine, you will make the line go faster during the boom cycles between movies, but you have added labor expense during the lulls, which cuts into your margin. At the very largest multiplexes, movie start times can be effectively staggered to even out this cycle and maintain constant demand, and I have seen division of labor in these cinemas as suggested above. But it’s not common.
Here in Europe, I see a different arrangement, more like the “cafeteria” system mentioned above. The concessions area is basically a self-service lobby, and the employees are stationed at cash registers at the exits. You enter through a turnstile, grab whatever snacks and drinks you want, and pay on your way out, through another turnstile. There are no soda fountains with cups; all drinks are bottled. Popcorn is pre-bagged and shelved.
It’s a very efficient system, but for an existing movie house, there are two barriers for adoption.
First, it requires a significant remodel of the existing space. You need to reorganize your whole interior lobby, not just to create a controlled space for self-service concessions but also to channel foot traffic of moviegoers around this space, whereas in the typical current lobby they are free-roaming on their way to the various screens. Closing your cinema and spending the money to rebuild is a non-starter if you’re running a business with extremely tight margins and very little free capital.
You would think a forward-looking entrepreneur might have taken advantage of the pandemic closure to reorganize their spaces, and it’s entirely possible this has been happening. I’ve been out of the U.S. for years, so I no longer have direct observational experience. But I wouldn’t expect this to be a major revolution, because of the second barrier: old-fashioned thinking.
The main consideration here also comes out of the razor-thin margin factor. Specifically, the issue is “shrinkage,” i.e. theft. Any time you’re letting your customers put their hands directly on the products, there’s a risk they’ll slip an item or three into their pockets. With food, also, there’s the snacking/grazing issue, especially at the bulk-candy bins. It’s a lot safer, this thinking goes, to keep the product entirely under control behind the counter. Now, my experience here in Europe shows that there’s probably a business case to be made to refute this perception. The greater efficiency of centralized, dedicated labor might make up for the losses in shrinkage, creating a net benefit. But whenever you’re arguing against someone’s beliefs, trying to dislodge long-standing preconceptions, you’re starting out with a big uphill climb. That, combined with the first barrier, has created significant inertia in the space.
Which, of course, is exactly the set of circumstances one would normally point to as making a sector ripe for disruption. “There’s an obvious efficiency waiting to be claimed, and the existing players are too stodgy to adopt it!” This is true. But— if you want to get into the movie exhibition business, starting from scratch, you have to have the capital to buy or lease enough territory to build several thousand screens worth of movie house nationwide, in order to be a viable outlet for the major distributors to consider offering their films to you. Further, you’d be entering a sector with several large existing players, meaning it’s already pretty well saturated and the favorable sites are already claimed. And you’d be getting into a business whose already-tiny profit margins are continuing to shrink, so good luck attracting investment money to your scheme. (Existing businesses would be unlikely to embrace this transformation, for the reasons noted previously.)
Now, all of this being said, I do think that film exhibition, as a general sector, is going to be significantly disrupted in the coming years. It was already teetering, due to many factors — the overreliance on a shrinking number of tentpole releases, the decreasing quality of the in-theater experience leading to a narrowing of the attendance demographic, the improvement of in-home viewing options — and the pandemic took a wrecking ball to it. I think, twenty years from now, cinemas are going to be very different. For most people, it’ll be a big special event, with gigantic screens and huge auditoriums, and ticket prices to match. For cinephiles, there will be tiny dedicated houses with a few dozen seats. The in-between of medium-sized screens and facilities will vanish. Routine viewing will be largely in-home.
If I had a billion dollars and wanted to make a long-term investment, I would buy out one of the smaller failing chains — Regal, say. I’d dramatically shrink its holdings, dumping at least half of its facilities. Then I’d massively remodel what remains, looking ahead to the probable future situation, gutting the 18-plexes and replacing them with four or five oversized spaces per site. (And, yes, a cafeteria-style concessions lobby, plus even better food options for in-seat delivery.) This means the whole operation would be closed for probably two years after acquisition before re-opening. It would look a lot like the Alamo Drafthouse model, except it would launch nationally instead of slowly growing region by region, it would be heavily focused on tentpole spectacle to attract an audience beyond the habitual repeat viewer, and it wouldn’t have a toxic dipshit at the top, enabling a culture of sexual harassment. With those changes, it’s a good indication of where the exhibition experience is likely to evolve.
But (TLDR) the problems with the current cinema exhibition business go well beyond “the concessions counter is inefficient.”