Perhaps it had to happen eventually. Joshua Thompson, a Michigan "security technician" furious at being prohibited from carrying his own food and drink into the cinema, last week filed a class action against a large American cinema chain. His lawyer claims that for AMC to charge around $8 for a Coke and some chocolate-covered peanuts amounts to price gouging. A professor of business law at Eastern Michigan University has called the suit "a loser", but Thompson is not the only cineaste horrified by the price of snacks.
From a business point of view, cinemas are only partly about films. "When we bought [Odeon]," Guy Hands of private equity group Terra Firma famously said, "the management team really believed they were part of the film business. I had the difficult job of explaining to them that they were in the popcorn-selling business."
Cinemas are obliged to split money from ticket sales with the film studios, but get to keep almost all the cash they make from selling food. That means that the "concessions" (popcorn, sweets and the like) make up 20% of a cinema's revenue but 40% of its profits. A box of popcorn is around 85% profit to the cinema, and salty foods of course encourage people to buy more soft drinks, increasing receipts further. "Without the hefty concession profits," declared an article in Time a few years ago, "there would be no movie theater business".
Going to the cinema is now an expensive night out: a tenner or so for an adult ticket is not uncommon. Faced with costly tickets and food alike, it's not surprising that many people smuggle their own scran into cinemas. A postman who was denied entry to a cinema for bringing in his own sweets launched what the Daily Mail called a "one-man campaign" against high concession prices a couple of years ago, apparently to little effect.
Although Hollywood is having a torrid time in the face of illegal downloads, sales of cinema tickets are largely holding up. Box office receipts rose 8% between 2008 and 2009, even though the biggest studios saw their total revenues fall 4%. (Numbers were down a bit last year because of the recession.)
This makes it hard to feel too much sympathy for the cinema chains who so viciously enforce their don't-bring-your-own-Maltesers rule, especially when the food they do offer – stale popcorn, plastic sweets, nachos which smell of feet and those weird rotating sausages – is uniformly revolting. I suspect many people would buy food at the cinema if that food were any good, and I rather hope that Rowley Leigh's newish venture selling high-end food at one cinema marks a change in the quality of cinema food. Otherwise our hopes will have to rest with the Michigan class action.
