If you’ve been to the movies you’ve most likely grumbled at the ticket price. You’ve also most likely grumbled at the condition of the seats and bathrooms, both of those have been covered already by some of our other incredibly talented writers here at Odyssey. However, most of you have also looked at the prices of your favorite movie time snacks and probably wondered, why the fuck did I buy these? Naturally, the urge for Swedish fish or Reese’s pieces overpowers our more reasonable side of thinking and we find ourselves munching unhappily on a fourteen dollar bucket of stale popcorn. On AMC Theater's own website, they list all their snacks options WITHOUT ever stating a price.
It’s no secret movie snacks are expensive often dwarfing the price of the ticket itself. Several of the theaters I’ve been to have charged nearly thirty dollars for a medium popcorn and drink; an incredibly exorbitant rate with the UC Irvine Merage School of Business reporting that an $8 bucket of popcorn only costs the theater 90 cents to produce. The unfortunate math leaves many of us questioning why particular snacks should cost us so much. I’ve been able to find at least, a somewhat viable answer.
In short, movie theaters claim the reason for their high snack prices is due to the fact that snacks are where the movie makes most of its money. The movie studio allows certain theaters to play their movie but demands enormous amounts of profit back, up to 70 percent of revenue from theaters according to Marketplace.org. By demanding such large shares of the movies profits, this leaves theaters needing another method of making money; snacks.
The profits of food belong exclusively to the theater and go to pay for power and equipment even if no one is watching the movies being seen. Stanford found that even unpopular movies had high levels of concession purchases and found that groups tended to purchase more snacks. This allows the theater to recoup the money it was making less of from the empty screening rooms. They also suggest that theaters should study group dynamics to further maximize their profits which sounds more akin to helping out the screening houses than the customers, but I’ll leave that to your discretion.
Regardless of your feelings on the business practices of the movie theaters or the film industry as a whole, the prices are exactly what they are and show no sign of going down. As bigger budget films continue to flood the market, movie theaters might even have to raise prices further in an attempt to stay above water.
