The Paramount. Downtown, nowhere to park on the busiest nights. Nowhere to park on the lightest nights. The floors were always sticky and covered with crunched popcorn and the rumors were if you took a seat in the balcony, you’d either be surrounded by smoochers – ew! Cooties! – or the balcony would collapse onto the main floor seats and you’d get your name in the local paper. So only the smoochers and the creepy dudes sat in the balcony, until the theater locked the door.
The secret was $1 per ticket. One dollar per ticket, sure, for second- or third-run movies, movies that’d played out at the Mann, the Rio, the Centre, or the UA Cinemas, which at the time charged an appalling $4.50 a seat. But they had video games in the lobby.
One dollar per ticket. And if you knew the lady selling tickets – and we did – you could also buy movie posters for $1.
Those days are gone.
The Paramount theater is now part of the Willard Arts Center, which fixed the balcony, got rid of the smoochers and creeps, but charges upwards of $75 for performances.
The Paramount itself lives on, in a new theater built by the mall, where movies are $2.50. The Mann and UA theaters are gone, and the Rio is part of a local arts organization. The Center is now our art house.
So I can understand the appeal of MoviePass.
Ten dollars a month, and you get to see a movie every 24 hours, with the company paying for your ticket (which, if we were going to the new Edwards Theater in town, would be in the neighborhood of $10 per showing).
I never understood the MoviePass math.
That’s a minimum of $300 a month they’re paying on a $10 return, if you’re one of those sickos who go to movies every day. I’m sure they have a few customers like that.
Even at one film a month, they’re breaking even. Or not, as movies locally are a bit on the less expensive side than in other areas.
So how were they going to make money on this? I suspect they and the gnomes had the same business plan.
Maybe they thought it would be like a gym membership. People would buy one but just not use it.
No, no, no. Because gym memberships involve the hardship of exercise. Let someone go to a movie a day for only $10 a month, and they’re going to use it. Maybe not every day, but certainly enough that MoviePass the company is going to lose money on each customer.
Their current company strategy seems to be to get customers by offering a cheap price, and then ratchet those prices up once the customers are in place. My cheap, movie-loving friends have clearly proved that plan to be flawed, as many are bailing on the service now that they’re not getting the killer deal once offered.
What did MoviePass expect its customers to do? Oh yeah, just roll over and take it. Apparently, that’s not gonna happen.
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