Kevin Smith Thinks That Going to the Movies Is Too Expensive Right Now, What Do You Think?
I go to the movies a lot and where I live in California, it costs $17 to $22 to buy a ticket to see a movie. When I take my family to the movies, we’re looking at around $140 when you include soda, popcorn, and candy. I do have a monthly subscription to AMC Theaters to help ease the burden, but yeah, it’s expensive!
I’m not the only person that feels that way, though! Kevin Smith recently shared his thoughts on the movie theater industry following a string of underperforming blockbuster films such as The Flash, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Smith believes that a lot of people just can’t afford to keep dropping money at movie theaters. I know that for me not only is the crazy inflation hurting, but there’s also a drop in income for some people as well. At least that’s what I’m personally experiencing. It sucks. I’ve had to make some budget cuts to make things work, and I can see other people in the same situation doing the same thing. One of those things that people may be cutting out is movies. Smith said:
"Bad movies will be with us forever, like cancer, like that's not it: It's not like movies suddenly got bad. It's different. An audience has been trained now to like wait. Number one, movies are too expensive. I'll be honest; as an exhibitor, I'm going to say that, because I've been to other movie theaters and I see their prices... I think the price of movies is high, and I also think that... the shrinking theatrical window definitely f*cking hurt... home viewing has become preferable. Why would you want to go out when you can watch something in our own home, on a nice giant TV with a picture quality that's pristine... The Flash came out on June 16th? The Flash is hitting streaming July 18th... a movie that was just in movie theaters... You've got an audience that's like 'Why would I bother going out?'... It has nothing to do with bad movies or woke movies – it has everything to do with how people have been retrained to ingest films during COVID and after COVID."
Conditions are definitely different now and I know so many people that I used to see movies with all the time that don’t go to the movies as much anymore. They are more than happy to wait to watch it on TV at home to save some money.
Back in 2013 filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg predicted that this would be the future of moviegoing. They also predicted a few other things that have come to pass. Lucas said at the time:
“You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things. Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks, like what Broadway costs today, or a football game. And that's going to be what we call ‘the movie business.' But everything else is going to look more like cable television on TiVo.
"It's not going to have cable or broadcast. It's going to be the internet television."
Spielberg said, “There's going to be eventually day and date with movies and eventually there's going to be a price variance. You're going to have to pay $25 to see the next Iron Man. And you're probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln." Lucas jumped in to say, “I think eventually the Lincolns are going to go away and they're going to be on television."
Now, here we are. It’s pretty crazy to see all of this come to pass. What are your thoughts on the current state of movie theaters?