In Praise of Movie-Ticket Prices
Chatterbox loves to go to the movies. Mostly this is because he loves
movies, but partly it's because moviegoers enjoy one of the last great consumer
bargains in America. This is not widely recognized. Especially in New York City
(where prices for movie tickets, and most other things, are higher than they
are elsewhere in the United States), politicians are constantly grandstanding
about the high price of movie tickets. In March, New York City Council Speaker
Peter Vallone issued a press
release urging the Justice Department to intervene because Loew's Cineplex
had just raised ticket prices in Manhattan to $9.50. Vallone kicked up a
similar fuss two years ago when Sony-Loew's New York Lincoln Square Multiplex
raised prices to $9. A decade earlier, then-Mayor Ed Koch actually urged a
boycott when movie-ticket prices rose from $6 to $7. (Click here to
read CNN's coverage of the earlier controversies.) The boycott fizzled because
... well, because, $7 wasn't all that much to spend on an evening's
entertainment in Fun City.
Chatterbox lives in Washington, where a Saturday night visit to what is
widely recognized as the area's spiffiest movie theater, an Art Deco palace
called the Uptown, costs $7.75 ($9 if you purchase an advance ticket by phone).
That's still "high" by national standards; according to the Motion Picture
Association of America, the average movie-ticket price last year was a mere
$4.69. Is that higher than it used to be?
Take a look at this chart, which Chatterbox found on a Web page about inflation that
was forwarded to him and several other journalists by Jonathan Rauch,
the economics columnist for National Journal . Observe that in constant dollars,
movie-ticket prices more than doubled between 1935 (when they cost a quarter;
that's $2.93 in 1999 dollars) and 1970 (when they cost $1.55; $6.68 in 1999
dollars). Prices for movie tickets peaked, in constant dollars, during the
1970s. By 1980, movie-ticket prices had dropped to about $2.69--$5.46 in 1999
dollars, where they stayed until 1990. Constant-dollar movie prices dropped a
bit more in the early 1990s, stabilizing during the middle 1990s at $4.70 to
$4.80 (in 1999 dollars), where they remain.
It's interesting to note that the 1970s, the decade when the price of
going to movies reached an all-time high, was also the decade when Hollywood
movies were better , in the aggregate, than they've ever been before or
since. This was the decade of The Godfather , Chinatown , and more great films than Chatterbox can count
by Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. It's tempting to conclude that
if consumers paid more for movies, they would get better movies. But the 1980s,
which produced movies that were worse in the aggregate than movies being
made today (and much, much worse than the movies that were being made
during the 1970s) would seem to disprove that hypothesis, because movie-ticket
prices were higher then (in constant dollars) than they are now.
Perhaps the reason movies were so good during the 1970s had to do with the
size of the audience. According to data (not available, alas, online) from the
Motion Picture Association of
America, weekly movie admissions dropped from 78 million in 1946 to an
all-time low of 15.8 million in 1971. Weekly admissions stayed in the teens for
most of the 1970s, rising to the low 20s during the 1980s. (Chatterbox assumes
this has something to do with U.S. demographics.) Conceivably the shrinkage
caused the moviegoing public to become more like shoppers in a boutique than
shoppers in a supermarket--i.e., less interested in mass-produced items, and
more interested in quirkier handcrafted products. But if that's true, it cannot
be extrapolated that movies continue to get worse as audiences continue
to expand . If that were true, movies would be worse today (weekly
admissions numbered 27 million in 1997, the last year for which data are
available) than they were in 1985 (when weekly admissions numbered 20
million). But in fact, movies are better today (assuming you don't count
Eyes Wide Shut ).
