By Carl Cabrall
780 Million movie tickets were bought in America in 2025. Why?
Out of a population of almost 350 million people living in the United States, 780 million tickets were bought. If you average each ticket at $20, the sales total $ 15,600,000,000. That is a lot of money. This would suggest that people are buying multiple tickets and may very well be having a good time. So what is it that is causing patrons to come back over and over?
Someone said, people take their sweethearts to the cinema and fall in love all over again. It’s the atmosphere that promotes the desire to be close to each other. The closeness of the seats, the near darkness of the theater, and the temptation to hold hands and steal a kiss all add to the specialness of the moment.
Then there are those of us, including myself, who follow a movie franchise for years, as a matter of fact, from childhood. Many of us have read the Marvel comics. Some of us are Trekies and are ardent fans of Star Trek. Many of us are Superman Fans but we also enjoy all the Batman and Spiderman movies. The emotions of the movies become intense as we are swept away with booming sounds of state of the art surround sounds. We grip the popcorn with a vengeance and mindlessly shove mouthfuls “down the hatch.” Some theaters even have tactile effects such as wind and vibrating chairs or 3 dimensional emersive visual technology that sweep you away into another world.
The sound effects and the visual effects are out of this world. Many movie production operations make male documentaries showing the behind the scenes technical operations that produced their blockbuster. Many directors, such as James Cameron, who produced Terminator and the Avatar films amongst others is known for inventing new technology that has brought rapturous CGI ultra high definition films that though 3 hours in length, seem timeless and worthwhile. Many franchises gross over a billion dollars globally, making the next installment a worthwhile investment, while giving the fans 780 million reasons to return. What are your thoughts?
By Carl Cabrall
Sneaking snacks into the MOVIE THEATER. Why?
The last movie I went to see was avatar three. My son and I went to Lowe Lincoln Square IMAX to see the film. The tickets were about $66 for the two of us. By the time we added snacks we were passed $100. Honestly, that was just totally ridiculous. I am quite sure that their theater accountant was very happy at the end of the shift having achieved their objectives. Perhaps overhead are just too high and causing these exceptionally high concession prices. Some folks probably do not care about the amount of money that they spend on movie snacks, but I do. I also know for a fact that I am not the only one.
Diehard movie funds need to eat, but they are not interested in mortgage in the house to do so. I first overheard friends talking about the whole idea of sneaking movie snacks into the Theatre. I never really thought of doing it mainly for ethical reasons, but can you really blame anybody for doing this ? Are the snacks even worth fighting for? What do I mean by this? Movie snacks are not the best food for your health. Excessive amounts of butter and salt. Definitely can wreak havoc with your body. The large cauldron-like cups of sugary soda are not helpful to the body and the vital organs.
In reading up on this “perplexing global crisis,“ The general consensus seems to suggest that movie theaters only get but a pittance of the percentage of the cost of the movie ticket we purchased. For this reason, in order to make money and cover overheads, they need to sell concessions with extremely high mark-ups. Sources on Reddit (todayilearned) as well as on LinkedIn (Bill Fanter) suggest markups on popcorn that are as high as 1275% above the cost of preparing popcorn in your own home.
Another way of looking at this is that there must be something utterly special about going to the movies that would cause us to not only ignore these prices, but still faithfully pay for concessions just for the sake of saying that we had a snacks.