Brilliant movie! ... I'm never going to the cinema again!

the only thing theaters are good for is a neutral locale for luring females into dating. Period

In my area, the only thing the theater is good for is for congregating teenagers to lurk outside of until the inevitable brawl breaks out, at which point the cops break it up until the following evening. Repeat ad nauseum.

Last movie I saw in the theater was the first Hobbit movie. I may go see the new Star Wars on the big screen though.

The last movie I saw in the theater was "Are We There Yet" for my son's birthday party. Prior to that, it was probably ET. Yet I dont feel Ive missed out on anything. The best parts of the movies are usually in the trailers anyway

You are right. It's very expensive in any way you see it, especially as a Sunday night fun. I think, though, it has become something of a trend.

Back in 2000 cinema was in a crisis. Few people were going. The last few years, with the aid of marketing and eye candy new cinema/mall style, people watched it as a trend(all these apply for Greece. Experience may vary at other countries).
My next cinema movie is Star wars.

Uh-oh, Mod obsessive alert... lol.

Yeah, Star Wars will be a tempter, but I know for a fact it wont be worth £15

2001 wasn't a year of crisis, you have to go a long way further back than that to find a crisis year, most notably the early 1980s.

2001 was a pretty good year all things considered:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2001&p=.htm

Just look at the top 3 - The first Harry Potter, the first Lord of the Rings and the first Shrek - and barely any sequels in the top 20.

... the first Oceans Eleven, the first The Fast and the Furious, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the Others, A Beautiful Mind, AI: Artificial Intelligence, Monsters Inc, Blackhawk Down - we used to do ok with an element of risk...

Now it looks like I'm derailing the Mad Max thread, lol. Which is why it was a new thread. My thread wasn't about Mad Max, it was just a coincidence that what happened was with Mad Max and there happened to be a recent thread about Mad Max. But the thread wasn't really about Mad Max, which is why none of the respondents mentioned Mad Max.

Hope that makes Mad Max sense…?

How about I edit my post so that all mentions of Mad Max are replaced with Furious 7?

I've just come back from watching XXXXXX. It was a great movie. It was no Godfather and it was equally no Robocop, but it was a great movie. It had just about the right quality to be the kind of movie you want to see when you go to the cinema. If this had been 2001 I would be delighted to have sat through the performance and be content that people still made decent movies.

However, as with my recent visit to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, I've come home knowing that I've watched a good movie but that the picture I saw was not worth the money I paid to see it. Which is a remarkably strange mix of emotions to walk around with. After seeing an advert in the cinema which claimed Tuesday's were one third off I queried my bill with the manager on the way out. Apparently you needed to 'sign-up' for bargain Tuesdays…

I parted company with the manager with words to the effect of "I think I shall just cease going to the cinema in the future". This kind-of surprised me somewhat as I wasn't expecting to have come to this conclusion, but the way I said it so 'meh'ly and with all the vigour of a dying 100 year old, I came to realise that this thought has actually been a very long time coming.

My adult love for the cinema started in 2001. Sometimes I would get this desire to just 'get out the house' for the day, the usual young-man-syndrome thing. That age where you either find random things to do or you foresee yourself drinking your boredom away with ever larger glasses of scotch. I'd always loved movies, but traditionally from the perspective of television and £3.00 (3 for £6.00) VHS rentals, so the sudden realisation that, wow, I could spend the whole day at the cinema and watch these movies how they were meant to be watched entered my mind easily. (my city of birth went many years without any regular cinema, so it wasn't automatic culture for me).

I soon discovered that my nearest Cineworld cinema offered something called a 'Bargain Tuesday' where tickets were one third off. On the 14th August 2001 I paid a grand sum of £10.80 to watch three, yes, that's three movies. Heck, even with the £2 petrol money, the £1 for a bottle of coke and maybe even £6 on lunch or snacks, I would have one really, really enjoyable day out for just £14-£20. Sometimes I'd watch complete crap, sometimes I'd even walk out, but mostly it was mediocre usuality with the odd great movie, but, essentially, it was kinda-like just a thing I did. Like my own personal religious day of rest. I went regularly, almost weekly at points.

Now, let's fast forward to 2007. 13th August 2007 to be precise. My £10.80 now only bought me two movies. Still paying £1 for the bottle of coke, still paying £2 for the petrol money and still maybe paying £6 for lunch, but I'm now only getting two movies. Still, not quite so bad as movies seemed to have got longer and better quality since 2001. I found myself watching 2 x 2/2.5 hour movies instead of 3 x 1.5 hour movies. So it's the same bang for my buck, possibly even better bang for my buck… but it's just that slightly less interesting, because its 2 instead of 3. I went quite regularly, almost bi-weekly at points.

Now lets fast forward to 2015. To my only two cinema visits so far this year. Age of Ultron cost me £8.70 + £2.00 parking (the street spaces are never free any more due to council clamp-down on free parking) = £10.70 for just one movie. Still paying just £1 for the coke and £2 for petrol, but I'm not making a day of it, so there's no chance of the £6 lunch. And then XXXXXX today, £11.59 ticket price + £1 for 3D glasses. That's £12.59 for one movie. Apparently it cost so much because:

a) The ticket costs more the more recently the movie has been released.
b) The ticket costs more if it's in 3D (they weren't showing the 2D version on a normal schedule, just one showing at 8pm).
c) In order to qualify for 'Bargain Tuesday' you now had to 'provide your details' to a spamming service first. Good God…

That's inflation for you, right? Well, not really. The only product that has inflated that fast over the same time period is Gold. Bread, Petrol, rent, you name it, no, not anywhere near 300+%.

And this is where I am. XXXXXXX - effing marvelous movie… but it's not worth £15 all by itself. And on this thought I made the realisation that, quite probably, I will never watch a movie that I consider to be £15 worth all by itself. Heck, I would come out of The Godfather with the thought that it wasn't worth 15 effing £.

And, I was never really in it just for the movie itself, the movie just formed a part of the whole experience of what we randomly refer to as 'A Grand Day Out'. The movie was just the one (fairly major) part of what I did while I was mooching about, it wasn't the thing in and of itself to the extent that just going to watch one movie would be in any way a similar activity.

So, yeah. XXXXXXX, awesome movie, but also the movie that ended my love for the cinema… go figure!

I haven't gone to the theater in 10 years and I'm never going again. I never watch any movie either.

I used to be a cinephile and my love for not just movies but the movie going experience was unparalleled. But things change. Audiences now treat the theater as their living room and while the expense has always been pretty high, the quality of the at-home theater has risen to the point that waiting a few months doesn't really dampen your experience.

These days 'going to the movies' is something I rarely do, and it's usually with a group as a night out for a very particular movie we've all been waiting for.

Well, sorry to hear that you really had bad experiences with cinema managers. The truth is that less and less people go to the movies nowadays - and yes they are getting more and more expensive and sometimes after watching the movie you feel like you wasted some cash... I still go to the movies, but not as often as I used to - I don't think that I will ever stop, because some indie movies are not going to be released on DVD/Blu-ray and you can only watch them on the big screen during some special festival. In big cities the situation with the cinema is better - there are more places, diversity in movies being shown and you can feel that they are fighting for the customers. When I go out to the movie I usually spent some cash on drinks/food and tickets are not cheap in Australia - usually $20 (like 10 pounds), but on Mondays in some places you can see a good movie for less then $10 and when you buy a membership for $25 per two year you can see any movie for $15. The blockbuster cinemas (Hoyts, Village) are a bit more expensive but I hardly go there (they have cheaper Tuesdays and you don't need to sign up).
However in the age of Internet and big TVs at home I totally understand your decision - you can have heaps of fun and great entertainment at home too.

To be fair, it wasn't the manager's fault, it was the corporate head office's fault. I think you'd have to be a bit of a loose canon to get angry with a franchise manager in the modern day and age unless it's something very specific. Also to be fair to Cineworld, neither of the cinemas were Cineworld for this years two visits, our local Cineworld got bought out by a company called 'Light' a year or two back. I have no idea if that was because it was a low profit venue or because it was a high profit venue or what the deal was as there's still lots of Cineworlds over the country.

We have a third cinema in the town which specilises in art-house productions, so I don't need to help finance the greed-machine (or whatever the problem is) to go see those (even though that place it quite pricey, so I don't go very often).

But I agree, I think I'll go back to my original method of just hanging about for DVDs down the line somewhere. In terms of the downloads, it's not quite as rosy as you'd think it is:

A couple of weeks back I thought I'd rent Thor: The Dark World in preparation for the Avengers movie. I thought it'd be £2.49 on Youtube or Amazon or whatever as it came out quite a long time ago. Alas, it was £6.99 on Youtube and on Amazon and I couldn't find anything remotely ye olde VHS-style price for it. It seems downloads follow the 'intelligent pricing system' where they wait until every last drop of big money is milked before they price it in the traditional rental price-range.

So I watched a low quality version for free on Youtube that had subtitles appearing 30 seconds before the actors said their lines (using boxes to block out the bottom of the screen and the subtitles). Lol.

Again, you see the irony of the industry moaning about pirates while they actually make it harder for people to see their movies... I don't pirate movies, personally, and I'm not going to argue that pirating is right, you can't hold an argument when there's actual law backing one particular side, but I'm happy to argue that the industry itself has kinda lost the plot in the greed farm which is about as helpful to their cause as a wildly slung sledgehammer to mend a wonky table leg.

Well, the way I see it the new movies cost so much more to make, and they usually suck. They spend $$$$ million on special effects which doesn't add anything to the story or the movie, without those ridicules effects the movie could cost much less to make and it'd be much cheaper to go to the cinema! However in Sweden we have something called retro Cinema which might be the perfect thing for you… you can go there to see movies for $8 or so, sure they won't be in the greatest HD and have the biggest screen, but I saw a lot of nice movies in those! They also have a one day ticket for quite cheap.

Just the other day I watched Citizen Kane for the first time and I'd easily pay $15 to see that one in a modern cinema without feeling any regret at all, because it has a great story and it leaves you with a lot of thoughts and feelings afterwards.. talk about great movie!!!

That sounds like a great little cinema you've got the privilege of having near you Gothic!

Just a note about the price, £15 = $22.50 :O or 21 Euros :O

Re: Special effects. As noted in my moved link, I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie for £3.80 at the cinema, and that movie was both extremely expensive to make and made plenty of of profit.

The main aspect which makes everything 'more expensive' is the 'intelligent pricing system' which has people jacking up their price for everything until they hit what they believe is a price ceiling - it has nothing to do with actual cost - like famous movie actors requiring 20 Million for their reprisal of a role instead of 1 Million, like FX companies jacking up their own fee to 20 Million because they know they can.

When they made Ghandi in the early 80s it had a cast of 1000s because the people could be employed cheaply, the reason people can't afford to make a Ghandi now is that the people cost so much more. CGI brought back the epic movie with Gladiator when the vast crowd scenes were in-filled with CGI, but, of course, now the CGI teams are established and 'required' in almost all movies, they've now bumped up their wages…

lackblogger said:

That sounds like a great little cinema you've got the privilege of having near you Gothic!

Just a note about the price, £15 = $22.50 :O or 21 Euros :O

Re: Special effects. As noted in my moved link, I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie for £3.80 at the cinema, and that movie was both extremely expensive to make and made plenty of of profit.

The main aspect which makes everything 'more expensive' is the 'intelligent pricing system' which has people jacking up their price for everything until they hit what they believe is a price ceiling - it has nothing to do with actual cost - like famous movie actors requiring 20 Million for their reprisal of a role instead of 1 Million, like FX companies jacking up their own fee to 20 Million because they know they can.

When they made Ghandi in the early 80s it had a cast of 1000s because the people could be employed cheaply, the reason people can't afford to make a Ghandi now is that the people cost so much more. CGI brought back the epic movie with Gladiator when the vast crowd scenes were in-filled with CGI, but, of course, now the CGI teams are established and 'required' in almost all movies, they've now bumped up their wages…

Click to expand...

Well, didn't the movie theatre do any upgrades to bigger screens, 3D, high res and so on during those years though?

Not really. Same screens as in 2001, 3D has been around since the 1960s, High Res is a technological advance - technology is actually something that gets cheaper over time, you pay less in real terms for a new Ford Focus now than you did in 2001, and it will have much better specs, same for PCs.

The only reason we pay so much for movies now is 'intelligent pricing systems'. AKA, milking it.

xep624 said:

The truth is that less and less people go to the movies nowadays.

Click to expand...

Depends on the country I suppose. Here in France movie theaters had their all time highest attendance last year.

One of the factors causing the boom is Youtube. There's a huge number of people that now bottom feed off of new movies by basing Youtube channels around reviewing, discussing and dissecting new movies, and this is a global thing. This is the main reason why 'Nerd' movies are now the number 1 movies. Trailer videos are now regularly in the 'hot right now' section.

This combines with pester power as all the kids nag the carp out of their parents to go see every new cartoon.

Well, I'm the opposite. I'm going to start going more.

I hadn't been to a theater but once in the last several years. I built a theater room in my house and just didn't see the need. Recently my wife wanted to go to avengers for her birthday. I told her I had no interest going to the movies we have a home theater after all. I then went online to check for tickets.

I was surprised at what I found. You can now reserve seats online and every seat in the theater is a full size recliner, that's right I said a FULL SIZE RECLINER!! Well this will cost an arm and a leg, I thought. Nope, if we go during the day it's $6.50 a person. Yes concessions are still way over price but I got a popcorn and a 64 oz icee, yes 64oz none of that leaving mid movie to get a refill BS.

When we got to the theater, once again I was surprised. It was clean, I mean very clean no stained seats or popcorn in the isles. The screen was the latest and greatest curved screen and there were at least twelve speaker for surround sound. I was pretty impressed.

And the best thing is we went first showing on a Sunday and there was only 2 other couples in the theater. It was like watching at home but with much superior technology. I'll definitely be going back.

I have a very low tolerance for people who make what I call "unnecessary noise" - so I'm often a bit uncomfortable when I go to the movies. I don't enjoy playing the policeman - but I will, if I have to. I'm probably a bit of an HSP.

On the other hand, most people here are reasonably well-behaved and I'd say the good to bad experience ratio is around 3:1.

But that's mostly because I try to catch movies early in the day and after the premiere. I avoid large crowds when I can, because I despise what happens to people when they get into that herd mentality.

In a past relationship, I had a GF who absolutely loved going to the movies - and we often went several times per week.

But, these past couple of years, I think I've been to the movies once or twice.

I do enjoy movies in a theater, when it's a good experience, but the real reason I go is actually to enjoy a good meal afterwards, where you can reflect on what you've just experienced, with your partner or friend.

My current GF and I don't exactly share the same taste in movies - so there's really no reason to go. We'd rather just share a good meal and watch some TV shows - a few of which we can agree on

Also, I have a "home theater" kind of setup - so I have very little reason to go these days.

I should also add that I used to have a serious passion for movies and everything about them. I had a vast knowledge of directors, composers, actors, scriptwriters and so on - and I looked forward to the big titles almost as much as I looked forward to new big games.

But, these past 4-5 years, I've grown increasingly unsatisfied with movies - and I find the VAST majority of them extremely predictable and totally void of innovation or boldness.

Probably just as much about me as it's about the movies themselves - but what can I do?

sakichop said:

it's $6.50 a person.

Click to expand...

I want to live where you're living! Lol

@Dart - very similar on almost every front, take a thumbs up and thanks for the recognition of the part where the movie itself isn't the entire experience by itself, that's a big linchpin to my situation and it's nice to see someone else acknowledge that