This design looks so cheap to me, it’s just a bunch of random covers, there is no information about the movies presented in any way, the covers are way too big and take up an inordinate amount of space and there is nothing breaking up sections, design is just so fucking dumb now, fuck mobile
rant over 😅
My local movie theater in the heart of downtown has taken down all the movie posters outside the entrance and replaced them with a single screen that only shows ads for overpriced popcorn “deals”.
Before, anyone walking by knew which movies were currently playing; now, all they know is just how outrageously expensive the popcorn is.
I haven’t been to that theater since.
You should tell them.
Yeah, I guess I should. I just can’t quite understand how anyone could fail to realize how absurd it is for a movie theater to use its most prominent advertising space not for promoting its movie lineup, but for food offerings.
To me, this strongly suggests that this movie theater—which is part of a large chain—now sees its main product as food rather than movies.
I have absolutely no sympathy for that, and I can only applaud it when a company like that loses customers because of its own idiocy.
Movie theaters main products has always been food.
Movie theaters have never made money off the movies they show, they make their money off the food they sell. It has been that way for at least 50 years.
That may be so, but the popcorn with chemical “pee” has never been what pulls in customers. The movies were always the draw, even if food was the profit. Advertising that food seems short-sighted: who cares if you sell popcorn to a higher percentage of customers but you’re pulling in fewer customers
Not really “never”, but the standard movie deals have long called for the studios to get a 90% cut of the box for the first two weeks a movie runs, then it switches to a 50/50 split the rest of the way. Nobody seems to have noticed that this arrangement incentivizes movie studios to produce overhyped pieces of shit so that no good movie with serious staying power cannibalizes their own revenue stream. Just a total coincidence that most movies now are overhyped pieces of shit.
Don’t argue with me man, argue with the chain. They clearly agree with my position.
Who just walks past the movies and spontaneously decides to see a movie because they saw a poster for it at the movies?
I would wager pretty much no one. People plan to go to the movies to see a specific movie already. Advertising food and drinks is going to be more beneficial.
I usually goto the theater for a specific show, usually buy the ticket online ….
BUT, there are times, such as when I didn’t get a ticket ahead of time and my show is sold out, where I’m in front of the theater deciding whether to go in. It I see an interesting looking movie, I might see that. If the food advertising worked, it would have the opposite of the intended effect “why don’t we goto a restaurant instead ?”
How do you know your show is sold out?
There’s usually a signat the ticket booth. Maybe it’s alone, maybe title only,maybe it’s only visible from being at the window …. It’s generally not useful to pick an unexpected/unknown movie.
A good movie poster shows a snapshot of the genre, the basic plot, the main characters, all of which I might use to pick a movie
If it’s inconvenient to see my choices, If they make me go somewhere else, or goto their web site, I’m at least as likely to just leave
Well, I rarely plan to go to the movies—only on rare occasions, when I know a new movie I want to see is coming out.
I used to walk past the movie theater a lot, though, and see the posters and that’s how I found out about movies I didn’t know anything about or maybe knew of them but forgot. So it happened at least on occasion that I’d call some friends to go see the movie I’d just discovered by walking by the theater - on the weekend or something, not right away, of course.
I never really cared about the food options. Of course, I’d still buy popcorn and stuff, but a discount on it—after which the popcorn is still outrageously expensive—was just as little a motivation for me to go to the movies as any fancy seats or whatever. That’s all well and good, but it’s never been a reason for me to go to the movies. I went because of the movies—which I’d now have to research on my own, something I don’t do.
So: It may well be that I’m the exception. But in any case, I haven’t been to the movies since they replaced the posters with food ads. As I said, that’s simply because I don’t actively look up the lineup and therefore don’t realize that there might be a movie playing that would interest me—I certainly don’t care at all about the current popcorn prices, though.
I find it hard to believe that someone can be on Lemmy and not have any clue about what movies are currently out, coming out, or finds it too hard to type “what movies are on at the cinema” into DuckDuckGo or whatever the search engine of choice is on Linux these days.
Of course, I have a general idea. All I’m saying is that it was convenient to see what was playing at the movie theater when I walked by, as I do almost every day. You might not be able to imagine it, but the lineups also vary by country—even from city to city.
I just don’t actively look up the movie schedule, which I could do, of course. But I just don’t.
It’s like, say, the menu at a cafeteria: I could look it up online, but since you’re constantly walking past it at work anyway, it’s nice when the weekly menu is posted right in front of it. That way, you can see what’s for lunch even if you hadn’t actually planned on going to the cafeteria.
Food probably actually is their main product. Granted it’s been a very long time since I worked in a movie theatre but when I did they told us that of $14 or so of ticket price they only made about 50c and that candy bar sales were actually their real business.
Yes, that’s true, of course, but you’re not going to sell much if you don’t promote the lineup that actually draws in the customers, would you?
I mean, before, all you had to do was walk past the movie theater to find out what was playing. Like many others, I walk past it very often, and I’ve often spotted a movie that interested me and then come back a few days later to watch it.
Now I have to actively check their website to find out what movies are currently playing, which I don’t do very often.
The theater operators must be fully aware of this—as well as of the fact that the food options they’re now exclusively promoting are so expensive that they’re more likely to deter potential visitors than attract them.
It’s as if an attractive tourist destination were to advertise overpriced tourist-trap restaurants instead of the sights that make the destination appealing in the first place—and that would at least make the inflated prices somewhat understandable.
That should be obvious to any marketer or, for that matter, the management in charge. Customers, of course, aren’t interested in which products yield the highest profit margin for the company, but rather in what they get for their money—after all, no one goes to the movies for the popcorn, but for the films themselves. I’d say anyone who doesn’t understand that is completely out of place in this business. The experience has to be the movie; everything else is just an afterthought.
Dude come on… No one goes to the theater to find out what is playing there and no one has done that for well over a decade.
Your rant is silly.
Well, that’s how it was for me at least. The movie theater is right in the middle of town, which is why you’re constantly passing by it anyway. I don’t actively look up the current movie lineup, but I used to always be up to date because I passed by that theater almost every day and saw the posters.
Now I’m no longer informed about the current lineup, but instead only about the absurd prices for popcorn and stuff—I can’t say that motivates me to go to the theater’s website to see what’s playing.
Like I said: I haven’t been to the theater since they took down the posters. That’s not because tickets and popcorn would be too expensive for me, but because I have no idea which movies are playing right now. I don’t go out of my way to find out myself, but I used to walk past the theater and think, “Oh, cool, movie xyy is playing—I should go see that with friends this weekend.” That effect is now gone so I don’t go to the movies anymore.
So what should be glaringly clear to you is that you are no longer the target demographic for theater attendance. That information is all relayed through the app on the phone, as are ticket sales, seating arrangements and really the purchasing of food.
I guess I’m not the target demographic either then. I don’t think I ever was really, but as a parent of teens, if I do go in, it’s likely to be a family’s worth of tickets.
Maybe you think the rest of us are a minority that doesn’t matter but it seems short sighted to disregard potential customers
I have been going to the movies for about 50 years and I never found out what was in the theater by show up and walking up to the theater. I sure didnt do it when I was taking my family there, I did it with the news paper or calling…
Starting around 1999 I looked online.
Even young people don’t have the movie theater’s app because it’s completely useless. Only people who go to the movies regularly—and are therefore already regular customers—might use such an app. Of course, there are also promotional campaigns by the operators designed to encourage people to download their useless app—but I’m pretty sure most people only do that to get the discount and then delete the app right away.
Young people, in particular, can of course be reached through social media ads and the like, but you don’t seem to realize how expensive that is. I can hardly imagine that a local movie theater—or even a chain with many local locations—could achieve a halfway decent ROAS through this or other online marketing channels.
So in my opinion, it’s simply idiotic to ignore the prime advertising space this movie theater already has—after all, it costs almost nothing to hang a few extra posters on its own building. They could even do that alongside the food ads, which would make optimal use of this free advertising space. But they don’t do that; instead, they’ve removed all the movie posters for a single screen with food ads no one cares about.
I can’t understand the reason for that. If it has to be one or the other—which isn’t necessary at all—I think movie posters are much more effective. I mean, let’s be honest: Which is more useful to potential customers? Knowing which movie is currently playing—something you notice as you walk by, regardless of your age—or an ad for a small discount on tacos or something similar, that are still very expensive even after the discount?
Oh, and just to be clear: Of course, it doesn’t matter at all whether they’re actually posters or screens displaying the movie lineup.
The point is the informational value, which, of course, exists in the real world as well, not just online.
This may also be why they overly focus on blockbusters. Without traditional means of seeing what’s playing, I’m only aware of a movie if it’s been heavily advertised. You’d think trying the cheap route would be … cheaper
Yes, that seems plausible to me. I can’t say why the movie theater near me isn’t putting up posters or any info anymore, but since I don’t know the details that led to this decision, it simply seems like an awful idea on the part of management to me.
It could be that the film distributors no longer provide the necessary promotional material, though that also seems pretty silly, since it would hardly incur any significant costs. It is also possible that there are some major players that don’t want that because it would benefit them (small companies can’t compete with big capital that is needed for online ad campaigns).
Maybe it’s also due to some city regulations.
I can’t say for sure which or any of these might be the case, but I could very well imagine that it’s due to incompetence on the part of the theater’s operators. Although this is a nationwide, I think even international chain, that doesn’t seem to me to guarantee that there’s a plausible reason. Maybe it was a cost-cutting suggestion from a completely incompetent consultant who looked at some Excel spreadsheets and came up with the idea that the labor costs for putting up posters were an expense that could be cut. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
But anyways, I just noticed that the movie schedule at my local theater is no longer visible when you walk by. To me, that’s a loss, and I think some others might feel the same way—because while you can, of course, find information online, since this is a local offering, it seems ridiculous to me not to provide the relevant information on-site as well, especially since it could be done very, very inexpensively.