Originally posted by: vi_edit
Maybe it has something to do with ticket prices going up, and the quality of movies going down.
Hmmmmmm.....
Amen. Actually I don't think movie quality is going down all that much as you can pick and choose with a lot more options these days. And that's kind of a subjective measurement anyway (although it stands to reason that when studios are making WAY more movies than they were 20 years ago that the quality might be more suspect.) Not to mention the fact that we're simply seeing a saturated market. There's TONS of movies to choose from now and unless you have lots of money and nothing else to do, you can only see so many of them before they finish their run.
And ticket prices are definitely not subjective as the rise in those have definitely far outpaced inflation over the last decade. There have been plenty of threads on this before, but I still maintain the media ought to start using 'tickets sold' and not box office gross (or even screens as megaplexes keep popping up everywhere dilluting that number) as the primary reporting metric. But they won't because it doesn't have the same feeding-frenzy, self-marketing, hype appeal; 40 million tickets sold doesn't sound as impressive to the average joe as $300,000,000.
It's the very rise in ticket prices that keep me from going to the movies as much as I used to. After paying for just two tickets I've already covered the cost to purchase the DVD when it's released later (which I can then watch as many times as I want.) And God forbid if you want something to drink or some popcorn. It used to be that going to movies was considered a cheap date. Now it's sometimes cheaper to go out and pay the cover charge for a band or a comedy club and have a few drinks at inflated bar prices.