Amid a difficult year for cinemas, is it the increasing cost of tickets that’s putting wider audiences off?
It’s a common refrain in positive reviews: ‘go and see this movie on the biggest screen you can find.’ Another variation: ‘It deserves to be seen with an audience.’
There’s truth to these sentiments – movies do have more impact on a big screen with proper surround sound. There’s also the anticipation and sense of occasion. Going to the cinema to watch a movie you’ve been desperate to see for months is an event. It’s exciting.
That excitement might be tempered somewhat, however, by the sheer cost. At a cinema near me, the price of a ticket to see a movie on a regular screen is £12.99. This is at Cineworld, where cardholders get a slight discount, making a ticket £11.69.
Here’s an odd thing, though: if I were to drive about six miles up the road in a different direction, the price of a standard ticket at another branch of Cineworld is £6.99, or £6.29 for My Cineworld Plus cardholders.
On a recent expedition to see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, my partner and I asked an assistant manager about the discrepancy between prices, and he replied that the price was higher in this particular cinema because it had IMAX screens. Even though the tickets we’d purchased were for a regular screen, we had to pay a premium because there’s a large format option in the same building. A rising tide lifts all boats.
It’s hardly news that cinema chains are struggling. We only heard in recent days that the current owner of Cineworld is mulling the possibility of selling its 100 or so cinemas across the UK. Last year’s strikes have had a knock-on effect on this year’s film releases, meaning box office returns are down. The pandemic changed viewing habits, meaning more people are staying home to watch movies rather than go to the cinema.
There’s a question, though, of whether the sheer cost of watching a movie in a cinema is also putting off potential customers. On Twitter, Film Stories follower John Miller wrote something quite pertinent about the rising cost of tickets:
“Cineworld is the only one with an IMAX screen by me, but I have to use [Tesco] Clubcard vouchers to justify the higher cost for it. Their new adult and child ticket is a step in the right direction but I still think the secret to cinemas is much cheaper tickets.”
Nailing down exactly how much it might cost for a family of four (two adults, two kids) might cost to go to see, say, The Garfield Movie, is slightly tricky because prices vary between cinemas in the UK.
In my local theatre, though, it’d cost just under £30 with a Cineworld Family x2 ticket. At my nearest Vue cinema, it’d cost £27.96 if I opted for regular seats (‘super saver’ seats are £23.96; fancy VIP seats would set me back £35.96).
These are prices for a regular screen as well: if a family of four were to go and see the upcoming Inside Out 2 at 4:30pm at my nearest IMAX next week, they’d expect to pay £54.76, or £49.26 if they were a Cineworld card holder.
For a family night out, that’s an eye-watering sum – and also doesn’t factor in snacks or other potential costs like petrol and parking.
With costs like that attached, it would hardly be surprising if audiences have become more picky about what they leave their houses to watch. With a monthly Disney+ subscription costing about £4.99 a month, there’s an obvious temptation to simply wait until the House of Mouse’s major releases leave cinemas and appear on the platform.
In a way, multiplexes have brought this on themselves. Decades ago, most British towns had their own cinema. The small town I grew up in had one; it was a former Edwardian music hall and rather rustic, with stodgy seats and tinny sound. All the same, it was a viable place to go and watch a movie on a (relatively) big screen, and it was affordable (it was so cheap in the afternoons that it was common for parents to leave their kids at a matinee showing of Herbie Rides Again or The Jungle Book while they went shopping).
While it’s easy to be all nostalgic about that little cinema, though, it’s a sad fact that movie-going was falling out of favour by the mid-1980s. In an effort to coax audiences back, the multiplex model was imported from America, and The Point opened its doors in 1985. With its red pyramid of steel and glass jutting out of the middle of Milton Keynes, The Point had 10 screens, offered a greater choice of films, improved sound, and was a world apart from those stuffy small-town cinemas that were grimy and decades-old.
As multiplexes proliferated, however, smaller venues struggled. The little cinema near me responded by offering unfeasibly cheap tickets on a Tuesday night; for a year or two in the late 1990s, it was possible to see the latest movies for £1 a seat. Eventually, like so many old venues of its type, though, it succumbed to the inevitable and was eventually turned into a pub.
The loss of those local cinemas immediately had a limiting effect on movie-going habits: for most, multiplexes sat outside towns. For those who didn’t have access to a car, getting to them was immediately made more difficult. And with cinemas now dominated by major companies who owned multiple venues, the price of tickets crept up.
As a result, cinema has slowly, quietly moved from an affordable entertainment for the masses – something a working class person could enjoy regularly – to an occasional special treat, to a premium night out for the better-off.
Numerous factors play into the falling number of people going to the movies. Through the 1940s and 1950s, between a billion and 1.5 billion people went to the cinema each year in the UK. By 1960, as TV began to take hold, the number had dropped to 500 million admissions a year. The number declined annually until its absolute nadir of 54 million in 1984 – a dismal figure only beaten by the Covid year 2020, when 44 million people put on a mask and went out to see one of the few films released theatrically at the time.
Numbers have recovered since the pandemic, but they’re still way down on 2019’s peak of 176 million admissions – the highest they’d been since the 1970s. Just over 117 million British people went to the cinema in 2022, while the number for 2023 stood at a healthier 135 million. That figure will almost certainly be down again in 2024.
Ticket sales aren’t as dire as they were 40 years ago, then, but it’s still unclear when – or if – admission figures will return to the level they hit in 2019. And with cinema now having to compete with a growing number of distractions, from TikTok to streaming, it’s arguable that something needs to be done to entice more people to see films at their nearest fleapit.
Anyone who’s been to their local venue on National Cinema Day, when tickets are on sale for about £3, will have seen just how popular it is. There were so many visitors at my nearest multiplex last September that I could barely find a place to park. It’s surely a hint that if cinema owners lowered prices, and favoured packing out venues rather than selling tickets at a premium, then the situation would be better for both movie-goers and the industry itself.
Yes, films look and sound better on the big screen, and they’re more enjoyable with an audience – assuming it’s well-behaved. But if cinema-going is to become something more than an occasional special treat – or worse, a luxury for the wealthy few – then surely something needs to be done about those ticket prices.
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