The CEO of Spotlight Theaters, Joe Paletta, thinks all movie ticket prices – 2-D and 3-D – will soon be uniform, meaning 2-D movies will be more expensive. Is it better to maintain the pricing scheme audiences know?

YES

When the CEO of Spotlight Theaters, Joe Paletta, describes his prediction for an upcoming trend in movie theaters, it sounds simple and harmless.

“As an industry,” he told Screen Trade Magazine, “I think we’ll see a blend begin to emerge in 2012, where patrons will have a single price for both 2-D and 3-D films. 2-D prices will increase and 3-D prices will decrease.”

Makes sense, right? One flat fee for every movie. You know exactly what you’ll be paying every single time you walk into the theater, whether it’s for Titanic 3D or The Help in good, old-fashioned two dimensions.

Except this doesn’t make sense at all. Instead, it’s a cash grab by movie theaters seeking to please theater-goers by announcing they are “lowering 3-D ticket prices” when in reality they will be making more money from jacking up the cost of regular 2-D movies.

There are so many analogies that can demonstrate how silly this idea is. Let’s say a restaurant sells famous, gourmet $10 milkshakes, made with the finest, most expensive ingredients. The restaurant also sells fountain drinks and regular milk to go with your meal for only one dollar a drink. Customers are complaining about the high cost of the shakes. So the restaurant lowers the price of the milkshake to $5, and makes regular fountain drinks $5, too. This is completely ridiculous – even if you just want to drink a Coke, and don’t like milkshakes, you’re helping to pay for the cost of making the milkshake.

Just in case you thought that analogy was too much of a stretch, and that my opinion on movie pricing schemes isn’t valid to you, here’s famed movie critic Roger Ebert summing up what’s really happening here:

“In a move to recoup their unwise investment in 3D,” he wrote on Facebook, theaters will now be “punishing those who dislike 3-D” by raising the 2-D price.

Placing an extra charge on 2-D moviegoers to help subsidize the cost of 3-D movies is simply unfair to those who are uninterested in 3-D, or dislike the format.

Still, movie theaters can make the decision they want to make. As it stands now, this concept is just one man’s prediction; an educated guess from one CEO on the future of movies. But it’s a prediction theater companies should be wary about. In December, it was announced that movie attendance for the year in North America reached its lowest level since 1995. With innovations like Netflix and On-Demand, theater chains need to understand that making foolish decisions about ticket prices could end up resulting in movie theaters becoming completely obsolete.

– Adam Offitzer

NO

In a perfect world, 3-D wouldn’t be an additional expense on top of the already mind-blowing costs incurred by a night at the movie theater. Movie studios also would have the decency not to rush 3-D post-production conversion jobs to squeeze more money out of us, and theater culture wouldn’t have devolved to the rude, texting-filled experience it is today.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. So, given the very real financial constraints under which theaters operate, I think Spotlight Theaters’ recent proposal to have a uniform ticket price for both 2-D and 3-D showings is reasonable.

Understand this: Movie theaters absolutely do not have to meet us halfway on this matter. For all the bitching and moaning about how the theater-going experience has decayed while prices skyrocketed, Hollywood is still making more money than ever. Theater attendance may have gone down, but box office grosses certainly haven’t.

Movie theaters, for better or worse, are still the most common venue for viewing movies, and will likely remain so until a technological breakthrough can cram massive screens into all of our homes.

With that in mind, we’re pretty much at the mercy of the theater companies when it comes to pricing. Ticket prices, independent of the whole new 3-D and digital IMAX fad, have steadily increased over the past several years; partially as a byproduct of inflation and partially because it’s just harder to operate a movie theater these days.

Movie theaters are businesses, and businesses have to make money. If the big movie theater chains in America suddenly realize that 3-D is a fading phenomenon and now need a way to subsidize their hefty investments into that new technology, fine.

That Spotlight Theaters is doing so transparently and, simultaneously, decreasing the price of 3-D showings is commendable. Theater chains could have easily just jacked up standard movie prices without any explanation, and we’d still probably go to the multiplex.

Spotlight Theaters’ uniform pricing will help offset the chain’s expensive foray into 3-D projection. At the same time, it also brings some ancillary benefits.

For starters, theater admission prices get a whole lot less cluttered and confusing when there isn’t a 3-D surcharge. You won’t have to spend some time figuring out whether or not a 3-D matinee showing qualifies for a discount if there’s just a single pricing scheme for the theater.

Since running more 3-D showings no longer has any financial incentive, these theaters will have more motivation to evenly split 2-D and 3-D screenings, instead of just pushing the 3-D version of a film.

Expensive movie tickets suck, but they’re basically a fact of life at this point. Spotlight Theaters’ plan for uniform ticket prices is feasible from a financial perspective and reasonable for the end customer. And, hey, if you don’t like 3-D, stop giving James Cameron your money.

– Warren Zhang

offitzer@umdbk.com

chzhang@umdbk.com