Oh, won't someone think of the poor multiplex chain corporations!
If your argument held any water at all, none of the indie theaters where I live (which do not blast ticket-buyers' eyes with intrusive ad rolls) would be flourishing as they are. And yet, they are. And their ticket prices are on par with the chains, or less -- but with actual human food available.
Nah, what's driving the parasitic adpocalypse at the movie theater is good old-fashioned corporate greed. And guess what? Turns out a lot of people will just as soon stay home or go to an indie theater to have a better experience. And I'm one of them. $15 a ticket (where I live, anyway) is a pretty hefty price, on top of high-priced concessions. I'm paying a fair price to enter the theater, I expect to be treated with some level of respect that doesn't include blasting ads at me and my friends while we hang out in our seats before the movie.
Lap that garbage up if you want to, but if it's "necessary" for a movie theater to offer a terrible experience to stay open, then something is wrong with their business practices. Not everyone subscribes to your "ad subsidized" point of view. Marketers are already plastering every square inch of the earth with their "messages". And guess who pays for that, perversely? Where do you think the marketers get the money to pay for all that ad space? It's built into the cost of everything we buy. We are paying for this **** ourselves. Paying for our attention spans to be eroded, the basest and most crass imagery to be beamed right at us and our children. Enough.
Lol iunno where you live, but all the indie theaters where I live have shut down. Now I don't have access to their financials, but I can only imagine that they didn't make enough money to cover operating costs.
Do some research and run the numbers. Movie studios lease films to the theaters for a set amount of weeks, during that time span, they have a tiered % that they take each week. A lot of times movies make the majority of their revenue in the first few weeks, that's when excitement for a movie are at their peak and people are going to pack the theater. It's standard paractice for the movie studios to take 80% of ticket sales in the first couple weeks of a new release. In some cases of major releases, there have been instances of the studios taking 100% of ticket sales for the first week.
Do the math, and you will quickly realize that without concession stands sales and ad revenue, movie theaters wouldn't be around. You may have a few "indie" theaters that still manage to stick around, but that isn't the case everywhere, and even when they do exist, they can be pretty dumpy.
You may not believe in my "ad subsidized" point of view, but take it away and see how long you enjoy the simple things you take for granted. I'm sure you'd love having to pay a monthly subscription to google just to be able to google things each day, a monthly subscription for any social media sites you use, let's not forget your monthly Macrumors subscriptions and every other website you probably use for that matter.
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And this is the biggest fallacy. First, where do the companies get the money to advertise with? Many times I've "discovered" items at the grocery store that I like and are quite cheap. Then a few months later they start advertising them and the price shoots up 40+%.
Would TV shows not be as good if the actors didn't make $1 million an episode? That money comes from everyone who buys consumer goods. I guess for $100k they wouldn't do their best? The only reason they can make so much is the whole business is so big because advertisers pay so much. But that makes everything much more expensive.
Now add to that, how much do they really make for each person they annoy with their ads? You're right they don't make much off the ticket sale, but when you're paying $12 for a movie ruining the experience for 10-25 cents is just stupid. And how many people like me and the other posters here do the drive away so that's how many lost sales of popcorn and pop for the tiny extra they think they're making?
Lol you are making assumptions without any knowledge or facts. Just because an item at the grocery store goes up in price around the time it's advertised doesn't mean they are related. There could be 100 factors that goes into a price hike either from the company level or the store level... or both. You could possibly just be misremembering the timeline, the original price, or simply didn't pay attention until the item was advertised
You're also only thinking of advertising in terms of mega brands, but aren't considering smaller operations that need advertising to get their name out there. I owned a rather unique business at one point in an industry that no one had ever heard of. You better believe that the money we spent on advertising was absolutely essential to getting our brand any type of visibility. If it wasn't for "greedy" companies like google and Facebook, we would have shut down real quick because you can only do so much with word of mouth.
At one point we actually looked into advertising at our local theater, and their lowest package was $5000 a month. You have to believe that most the ads on the movie screen aren't paying the lowest tier, so you better believe the $5000-$20000 per ad, per month is definitely worth losing the handful of people like yourself who can't manage to be inconvenienced for more than 30 seconds.
There's a reason why actors and athletes are paid millions of dollars and it's not because it boost their performance but because people like you and I are willing to pay to be entertained. Whether you are paying for a movie ticket or renting it on Redbox there is a lot of money that comes back to the industry and actors and actresses have every right to demand top dollar for their work. Iunno what you do for a living... but let's assume that you are one of the top people in your field... are you not going to demand to be paid top dollar for your work? I'm sure if you are offered a million dollar raise tomorrow, you'll tell your boss to just write you a check for 100k and save the rest in order to cut back on advertising.
Like I told another guy in this thread, the "ad-subsidized" model allow you to do everyday things that you take for granted without constantly opening your wallet. Unless of course your willing to pay a monthly fee to use Google, any and all social media, Macrumors and every other website on the web, and many of the apps that you probably use on your phone.
