Free Post: National Cinema Day 2022

September 3rd is National Cinema Day!

For anyone who still cares about this stuff, September 3rd is National Cinema Day 2022. Unlike most “National Whatever Day,” some people actually sort of celebrate this one. If you didn’t click on my link above (Shame on you!), apparently several cinema chains are lowering prices to $3 for all movies all day long. Of course, you’re still going to have to pay out the ass for concessions.

When I heard about this, I was excited. I personally love going to the movies, but haven’t felt excited enough or bored enough to get to a theater much this summer. I thought this would be a good excuse to go to one, so I quickly opened my Fandango app to see what would be worth seeing for $3.00 plus a few hours of my time.

It didn’t take me long to realize why they chose the end of summer for National Cinema Day.

This has always been a slow time for movie theater chains. The silver lining was always that they probably had a really busy summer, so they made enough money during the busy months to allow them to coast through the back-to-school doldrums. With most movies going to streaming after a relatively short time in theaters, I have to wonder if movie theaters made enough cash this summer to carry them through. Not that I don’t expect Honk for Jesus to make a fortune on its opening weekend, with or without the National Cinema Day bump.

This is a weird time for theaters, and it’s not just streamers that are making it so. Just like a lot of other businesses, supply chain issues and employee shortages are impacting movie theaters. Plus, you think the fact that your home gas and electric bills have gone up lately is annoying? Trying heating and lighting a giant theater. Also, a lot of folks have built themselves pretty decent home theaters these days. Hell, I’m broke and even I have a pretty sweet TV in my living room. Why go to a movie theater and pay all that money and deal with all those morons on their phones who take their shoes off right next to you like they own the place, and…

…

Anyway, as much as I am not a fan of Tom Cruise, he did the right thing by insisting that Top Gun: Maverick be delayed so that it could be seen on the big screen and it could make him a killing be seen in the way it was intended. It was definitely win-win because everyone loved it, it made everyone a lot of money, and hopefully served to remind people that going to theaters to see a blockbuster movie can be worth it. Although, full disclosure, I still haven’t seen it (Remember, hate Tom Cruise.) Maybe it’s worth $3.00?

Was that a good segue or what? Back to National Cinema Day, the logic for offering a movie ticket for $3.00 is simple; most movie theaters make most of their money on the concessions. They have to spend a boatload of money for the right to screen these movies, so it obviously benefits them when you buy a ticket, but it really benefits them when you buy popcorn and soda and candy and nasty nachos. I know this was a long time ago, but when I was working in a small, two-screen movie house back in the day, they tried an experiment in 1994 to show Jurassic Park for $3.00. Remember, Jurassic Park was released in the summer of 1993, so this was over a year later. But it worked. Despite the fact that they could have rented the movie by this point, people came, and bought popcorn and soda. Not long after that, the theater owners decided to try a similar trick and offered showings of Speed for $1, about six months after it was originally released, and we sold out almost all our showings.

And of course, it is impossible to watch a movie like Speed without popcorn, so that sold like crazy, as well. It was probably the only time that theater actually made money in the entire time I worked there. Not long after I left (Ok, I was fired), the theater made every movie $1 and were selling out regularly. The sad thing is that the employees were still getting paid minimum wage despite the fact that they had to work a lot harder. Oh well. You really only took that job for the free movie passes.

Despite this economic imbalance, I still view seeing a movie, any movie, in a theater as the optimal way of doing things. Like buying a ticket to a sporting event or a concert or anything, buying a ticket to a movie holds the promise of something great happening. Sure, there’s also the possibility of extreme disappointment, but you take the good with the bad. My friends and I do a mostly movie-centric podcast and a lot of the movies we talk about are ones we saw in theaters, and we often remember the circumstances of seeing them, and how that experience enhanced the memories of the movies themselves. And a lot of the movies we talk about are decades old (like the podcasters themselves).

I guess the point is that I hope, no matter how cool someone’s home theater is, or how quickly a movie jumps to streaming, people still want to experience a movie in a movie theater, with people, even if they talk on their phones and take their shoes off. Hopefully, something like Top Gun: Maverick will come along every so often that reinvigorates people’s love of the format, and keeps theaters open. So dudes like me can work for those free passes.

That’s all I got for this post. There will be more stuff coming soon, so don’t forget to subscribe and smash the like button and everything else people do. Plus, check out my podcast, my Teepublic store, my comic, and everything else at the linktree.

Keep on keepin’ on!