Regal Entertainment Group is testing a new strategy that involves charging movie-goers higher prices for popular blockbusters and lower prices for flops.
According to Bloomberg, Regal Cinemas is teaming up with Atom Tickets LLC to try this alternative strategy of surge pricing in early 2018. This is, potentially, a big change for the film industry and ticket pricing should it catch on, seeing how ticket prices have typically never differed depending on the film.
“Changes to the historical pricing structure have often been discussed but rarely tested in our industry,” Amy Miles, chief executive officer, said via Bloomberg. “We’re excited to learn even more about how pricing changes impact customer behavior.”
While the idea may seem radical and potentially unfair to certain smaller production studios, the decision was likely to take drastic action in order to increase the declining ticket revenue. Netflix and other streaming sites have only risen in popularity as time has gone on, taking away money from theaters as consumers rather opt to spend the night in. MoviePass is another new trend, offering frequent movie-goers the chance to see up to one film a day for just $9.95 a month (although we're still not entirely clear how much of that revenue the theater itself sees).
Will people actually pay additional money to see event films like Star Wars or The Avengers come 2018? That remains to be seen, although it seems unlikely considering going to the theater to purchase tickets and snacks is already considered a fairly expensive affair, even before price increases.
Atom Tickets and Regal remain hopeful, however. “If we can get consumers to go one more time a year, that is transformative to the whole business,” Matthew Bakal, co-founder and executive chairman of Atom tickets, said via Bloomberg.
Not all that surprisingly, Twitter was pretty upset about the announcment:
No announcement when the price changes would officially begin, nor the amount of price increase or decrease has yet to be made.