In the area where I live, there are movie theaters scattered around the area so you can generally find one within about 5 miles of wherever you might be.
On several occasions, I’ve found myself wanting to go to a particular movie but without time to make it to the nearest theater for the next showing. “No problem,” I say to myself, I’ll just go to a different theater. So I look in the paper and find that every theater in the region seems to start their screenings at the same darn time!
Why do they do that? If I ran a theater, I’d make a real effort not to have a showing start at the same time as other places. My thought process is this: for people who plan their movie viewings, they won’t care too much what time it starts, they’ll just arrange to be there on time. But for the others, I’d want to be available to the people who just missed the screening at my competitors’. If I had a string of theaters, I’d want them to have showings staggered by 15 minutes or so to give people a chance to get to another theater if they couldn’t make their preferred one.
Can anybody in the theater business (or anybody else) offer some enlightenment on why they do this?