Dramas and the more arthouse or different stuff they can wait to see on their "small" screens at home.
I think this is a large part of it.
When tickets are $20each +$1 per pair of 3D glasses, + candybar. You're generally seeing a movie with at least one other person, if not a whole family - a trip to a movie can quite quickly add up in cost.
When it comes down to it - if you have the choice between The Hobbit or the new Star Trek film, are you going to see that, or are you going to see (for the same price, perhaps less $1-2 for 3D glasses) the new foreign film Rust and Bone, or even a film like 'Performance'?
Indie films, and smaller drama pieces, foreign films and the like are not going to be too much of a different experience whether you pay $20 for the ticket, or rent the movie for $6 at a DVD shop, perhaps $5 online in a month. And they're not the sort of movies that your friends will be talking about around the water cooler or playground (ie: did you hear any non-film folk say 'hey man, did you catch
Beasts of the Southern Wild over the weekend'?)
But you
will pay for the big movies. The tent-poles. Our local
real IMAX cinema charges
$45(!) for Hollywood IMAX movies like Star Trek or The Hobbit. But people will pay for it. There are those who
don't even know films like Rust and Bone and Performance exist, let alone that they're currently playing in cinemas.
But whose fault is it?
DDK said:
The old business model wants to make a large percentage off a limited volume whereas the new paradigm will be about making a small percentage off of a large volume.
Pirating thrives not because people want to steal but because the restrictions and pricing and distribution that is in place is felt to be unfair and unreasonable as the trend shifts away from physical copies to digital media.
Instead of charging $30 per movie on BluRay a month after it comes out in the cinemas and having one person buy it for every 1,000 that downloads it illegally, they could put it out immediately and charge $1 for it and get 1,000 people downloading it legally for every one person who gets it illegally.
That's all well and good, but what
is a
fair price? Do we charge $1 per film? Do we now need to sell hundreds of thousands more copies than we used to to make the same amount of money?
You're assuming that a film's audience isn't finite. There's an assumption being made that if films were cheaper, then many more people would go see it. Indeed, perhaps some would. But enough to justify a dramatic price drop?
Let's say 10,000 people download a movie. 5,000 buy it for $30.
You decide to change things up and sell it for $1. That same 15,000 people will still download/buy the film. Except, instead of making the $150,000 off the 5,000 Blu-Ray purchases, you're making $15,000 off the 15,000 $1 purchases. I don't really see the logic in it - the same amount of people see your film, and you make
10% of what you would have made.
The dying model of the cinema is all about getting the crowds in whereas the new model will be more about making the experience worth the price-tag.
I've covered this in past topics - I agree with you, the 'experience' of cinema is hardly worth the price tag at a lot of cinemas these days.