I bought tickets to my local AMC theater yesterday and they were around $9.50 each. Today I bought tickets for a different movie and noticed they were $10.99 each. Digging a little deeper it looks like between yesterday and today they started charging different rates for different movies at different times. They always had matinee pricing but this is different and appears to be the Flex pricing the other theater chain was considering doing. It’s a brave new world.
I used to be a manager for AMC (ages ago) and we had twilight pricing, which meant tickets were cheaper from 4-6pm than they were for matinees. This was in San Francisco so the rationale was to take advantage of people who wanted to delay the commute headache.
I hadn’t seen twilight prices at AMC anytime recently but there are so many other pricing variations (3D, IMAX, reserve seating) that it’s hard to keep track sometimes.
About damn time. I always wondered, for a business model, why increased demand for a movie didn’t increase the price. $2 movie theater is still a thing. Prices go down when demand does.
Was that the Kabuki AMC in Japan Town? I loved that theater. I used to frequent that place during my college days. In high school, I spent a few years working at an AMC in Southern California.
Our theater does different pricing throughout the day too. They also sell assigned seating (which is awesome). Now I’m waiting for them to tier pricing based on seat location. I figure that is inevitable.
Then it would be inevitable that the seat I would pick would be one of the recliners on my couch. Hollyweird seems to excel at finding new ways to make me want to rotate my sock draw instead of shelling out the big bucks to be sitting in a uncomfortable chair in the dark with people I would not want to be around in daylight.
Over 90% of the movies I have seen in the last decade, I have been paid to see as a mystery shopper. The number of private screenings I have had does not bode well for the industry.
I like seeing movies in a theater. I have a huge TV but the screen is still 20x bigger with better sound. There are no distractions as long as the crowd behaves. Plus seeing a movie with others makes for a better experience. Just do what I do and go to daytime showings. The crowds are usually thinner and older and well behaved.
I don’t like the idea of flex pricing for different movies. I would think that you’ll see much more prices go up for popular movies rather than prices going down for less popular movies. If this summer prices were raised $2 for Wonder Woman tickets, I imagine a large percentage of the audience would still have paid, so that would work out nicely for the theater. But if prices were lowered $2 for Valerian, I’m guessing that there wouldn’t be a huge increase in audience number, there would just be a decrease in the amount of money the theater made. So pretty quickly they’d stop the price decreases but keep the price increases.
I was wondering how widespread flex pricing is or how likely the idea is to spread and found this article. It brought up another thing I hadn’t thought about, that if you cut the price for a specific movie, it could send the idea that the movie is bad and that’s why they’re discounting it. Even if doing the discount tickets could bring in another few million dollars, I’m not sure the studios or the moviemakers would like that being attached to their movie.