I was just reading through this thread and considered making an analogy between professional wine connoisseurs and the Oscars, where a panel of experts has decided the merits of a film.
But I realised that there’s a subtle difference. Even if the layperson can’t judge the merits of something like a pro can, when it comes to films, he isn’t charged any more to see Million Dollar Baby than he was charged to see Iron Man. While as if I want to try a 1970 Chateau des Poux, it might cost me upwards of $300.
If I want to buy a luxury car, made with the highest craftsmanship and detail that could only be appreciated by a connoisseur, I have to pay the highest price.
But so why not do the same with movies? Why not charge $50 to see The Departed and $5 to watch Hotel for Dogs?
The price curve could certainly be set to be equally as profitable as the current flat system. So the question is whether this would have any effect on the industry. Would it help to finance more finely crafted films and/or more independent studios? Would it allow for better special effects in upper end film, or make it even harder to include?
I don’t see why this is in Great Debates when the answer seems quite clear: supply and demand.
A Château Latour 1982 is expensive not so much because it’s good but because it’s rare. The same thing goes for a Lamborghini. It has very little to do with the opinions of experts. Sure, if Robert Parker gives a wine a 98, demand is going to go up. However, the wine is already made, you can’t adjust supply, and prices go up.
If you’re a film distributor, you can make as many copies of a movie as you deem necessary to meet demand. If demand goes up because the film won an Oscar, you can just show it in more theatres. The reason for this is simply that it’s a safer proposition than raising prices. Furthermore, in the case of movies shown in theatres, you can’t forget revenue that comes from concession stands. You also get to show previews to more people. For the industry as a whole, it’s just more profitable to have more people see the films.
Where you do see prices go up much in the same way as rare wine is in the market for hard-to-find DVDs. The same can be said of books, and is in fact, even more true for books. A rare edition of a classic can fetch stupendous prices while you can pick up a paperback for a few dollars and download it for free from Project Gutenberg.
I’m hoping that in the future varying prices on distributed media could one day support the creation of high quality work. This is more apparent in TV than movies.
There’s a strong urge to race to the bottom in TV - to pick up the most viewers possibly, appealing to the lowest common denominator. Clearly this works to a degree - the glurge of reality shows brings in lots of eyeballs - but how committed would most of those viewers be to the show?
Contrast that to, say, Arrested Development for example, which didn’t pull in many eyeballs, but I would venture to guess that the average fan of the show had a far greater attachment to it than the average viewer of Deal or No Deal or The Bachelor would to theirs.
In the future, if media were more commonly ordered a la carte through digital distrubtion, if fans of Arrested Development or Firefly were able to pay twice or three times the average price of a show because it was worth it to them, it could compensate for having fewer viewers. There would be more support for niche programming that didn’t cater to the lowest common denominator.
TV would be better if there were some way to quantify the passion fans had for a show or movie as much as there is to quantify the raw amount of viewers.
What the OP is referring to is the way it used to be for many Big Name movies. Before the enormous nationwide broad-based release of films (which began around the mid 70s), movies started in major cities first and then worked their way down to smaller, second- and third-tier markets. And when a Big Film premiered in a big city, it would often be an Event–not only for opening night, but in the subsequent weeks of release: single venue, premium pricing, advance reservations, velvet ropes, the whole nine yards. Note that this wasn’t typical, but it also wasn’t uncommon. And most of the films that got this treatment were the ones that had big casts, large budgets, and huge critical and award-centered ambitions.
So as the other posters have mentioned, the change in distribution patterns (as well as the greater ease of technology and the undue pressure of a national or global opening weekend box office total) makes this model impractical nowadays.
With some theater chains, though, there is relative pricing based on amenities, priviledge and exclusivity. More comfortable seating, the serving of alcohol, better food, no kids–different “advantages” for a higher price is a strategy that some theaters (here and in Europe) employ to try to improve the experience–especially since the pressure of home theater systems are taking huge cuts out of their revenue streams. Going to the cinema has–in some circles and demographics–gotten a bad reputation, so offering a “premium” experience (for a marginal extra fee) is a way to pimp out a typical night into something nicer–especially when it comes to movies (arthouse/independent) that have greater associations to “high culture” already.
You mean a way to sell viewers’ passion. Remember that television stations don’t sell shows, they sell viewers.
Where I live, most American television series never get aired on television. However, many get released on DVD, and judging by the real estate they occupy at my local video store there is a decent market for them. The big sellers are the ones you could expect: 24, Lost, Prison Break… If people had to pay to see a show, Deal or No Deal might not survive, but I’m not so sure Firefly would do great either. It would be essentially like film, with blockbusters taking the lion’s share of the market.
The problem is that fans of Firefly and Arrested Development may be more passionate but they don’t necessarily have more disposable income. What’s more, I would guess that there is significant overlap between fans of these sort of shows. What this means is that regardless of how you sell them, the potential market for these shows will remain limited.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t save a few quality series with a better marketing strategy, but you can’t get around the fact that you’re mining a smaller market. By “smaller market,” I mean the potential monetary value, not the number of people. This is important, because, like contemporary art or Italian sports car, you can have a tiny market in terms of number of people but if these people happen to be super-wealthy, you can in fact do quite well.