Variable Ticket Pricing

Adding a little flexibility to movie ticket prices would increase customer satisfaction, distributor profits, and cinematic variety. Let's say there's an extremely highly anticipated film coming out, such as the next Star Wars prequel. Instead of releasing prints to a zillion screens and encouraging insane fans to wait weeks in line to buy advanced tickets followed by another week to get good seats, only to find the theaters empty after demand falls off, why not release the film to a reasonable number of screens and then sell tickets according to demand. In this case, at least $50 per ticket for the first couple of showings would seem reasonable. That would be a small price for some fans to pay to be able to say they saw the film on opening night, and it would weed out the more patient viewers. This could be integrated with the aforementioned assigned seating plan (graduated pricing could be introduced here as well; the better the seat, the higher the price), and lines would be all but eliminated with no loss of profit to the distributor. By the same token, titles which have been out for a while, and which have seen sharp declines in profit, could go "on sale," for perhaps a few dollars a ticket. Or, an independent distributor could encourage interest in its acclaimed but little-seen low-budget indies by knocking down the price. The normal seasonal ebb and flow could also be accounted for by charging more for summer and December releases, less for the fall and spring filler. Sure, this would drive up prices for those who must see the big blockbusters on opening weekend, but it would be a boon for the cool and competent cineaste. Furthermore, by offering these different price scales, variety would improve because low-budget and foreign films which couldn't normally compete with the higher-profile releases filling the multiplexes should draw large enough audiences to keep the host theaters happy, since all they're interested in is concession sales anyway.