Holy Massive Ticket Prices, Batman

cinema

I used to love going to the movies. I mean, it’s great watching a flick at home, with friends, where it’s OK to laugh and chat while the film unfolds. But sometimes you just want that big-screen experience, right? Sometimes a movie comes out that you’re just so excited about, you simply have to go and see it on a whopping great screen with a large popcorn and a room full of other excited enthusiasts, right?

Wrong. The cinema experience (in the UK at least) is being killed. Or more accurately, it is very slowly committing suicide. Last night I went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, a brilliantly enjoyable action blitz, but I’m not going to review that here. Instead what I’m reviewing is the cinema itself. And here’s what’s wrong:

1) Apparently I bought a platinum plated-ticket forged by the fair hands of a Peruvian forest nymph.

OK, let’s deal with the elephant in the room, first. Myself and my wife walked into the cinema, and asked for two tickets to the 3D showing of the movie, one ice blast (a cup full of cold sugar) and a Coke (basically the same), we also required 3D glasses which come at additional cost. The total expenditure for two tickets and two drinks… £33.98. I mean… What? I nearly swallowed my tongue as my wife handed over her card. The ONLY thing that made this bearable was that the majority of the cost was being covered by a gift voucher we received for Christmas. I could wax on about the sheer number of other items or experiences that £33.98 could net you, but you have a strong enough imagination, so I’ll just leave this here. It was bloody expensive. 

But hell, it’s got to be worth it for the cinema experience, right?

2) I’m a VI P.

Cinema seating is staged, this has always been the case. The seats at the back are on a higher elevation to the seats at the front. Well, in this particular screen (and all screens at this cinema) the tapered seating lasts for four rows, before the seats get quite low, and you have to tilt your neck backwards to see the screen. Hey, no problem though, you can just sit in one of these higher tiered seats to get around the issue, right?

No.

These are “VIP” seats. If the regular cost of the movie wasn’t bad enough, each one of these bad boys come at an additional £2 premium. For this, you get additional leg room and a healthy neck. There was nobody at all sat in this premium seating. So, what did that actually mean?

3) A sardine with whiplash.

So because nobody else wanted to stump up for the premium tickets, all of us wanting to watch the movie were crammed into the two rows of seats in front of the VIP section, oh there were more rows ahead of us, but nobody wanted those as they are way too close to the screen. So, out of a whole cinema, everyone watching this movie was crammed in to two rows of seating, with almost every other seat in the house left completely free.

Excellent.

This resulted in people kicking the back of our chairs, annoying loud conversation from several sections of the rows around us, and a cramped experience. Of course, this would have been the case had the cinema been full anyway, but it wasn’t, which just made the entire experience all the more frustrating. We had to have a few words with the people seated around us before they stopped making noise and kicking chairs.

4) Put your god-damned phone away before I feed it to you.

It used to be that people were encouraged (through embarrassing advertisements or otherwise) to turn off their phones long before the actual movie started. Of course, this makes sense, you don’t want to be interrupted by someone’s Frozen ringtone while the Hulk is busy pounding the hell out of something.

But wait… What’s this? There are now “interactive” advertisements in the lead-up to the movie, encouraging viewers to download an app on their smart phone and join in with quizzes and other content just before the feature starts.

What?

Seriously… What?

How the hell do you think that is going to pan out? There were at least three people near me that, once they had extracted their phones from their pockets to join in with the app, never put them away again. And so periodically during the film my eye would be caught and distracted as one or more of them checked their messages, causing the screen to light up and break me away from the immersion of the movie.

Whoever came up with that idea needs to take a long walk off a short cloud.

5) Is it cold in here, or is it just me?

I don’t know if this is a symptom of the nearly empty room, but was was cold. So cold that my wife had to spend the entire movie with my coat draped over her like a blanket. Seriously, turn up the heating when there aren’t enough warm bodies to keep the room at an acceptable temperature!

I’d rather have a parrot.

Cinemas, and in fact the movie industry as a whole, have been blaming piracy for a long time for the decline in big-screen interest, and of course, it is a huge contribution. Some people, no matter what changes were made to the silver screen to make it more attractive, would always pirate the movie, so where is the point in appealing to them?

But I encourage you all to sit back and think. Really, think, about your customers. Not your bottom line, the monthly figures. Don’t run your entertainment like an accountancy, we are not cattle to be herded through showings and ushered out the other door. People go to the cinema for the experience, not the movie. What are you doing to those hard core of people who crave that experience and refuse to pirate movies?

You are punishing them.

You are punishing your most loyal customers by increasing prices to compensate for the wayward ones.

You need to ask yourself some fundamental questions. Why is your main screen only one quarter full on a Saturday night for a showing of the biggest movie of this year? Because it’s too bloody expensive for a poor experience that crams the viewers into a small, cold space and encourages them to use distracting devices to ruin the experience, and then doesn’t police it.

Lower your prices. Not by a small amount, I mean, really lower them to something that will attract attention. Then maybe your screens will be full. But more than that, you need to think about your customers, not your pockets. Because right now, it looks like everything about your planning seems to be forgetting the comfort and enjoyability of the people you are doing this for. If indeed, it is us you are doing anything for at all.

Piracy isn’t killing cinemas. It is causing them to slowly commit suicide.

Rich

Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

If you follow me on Twitter, then I’m sure you know by now that I’m a huge fan of Elite: Dangerous. So much so that I’m now even sporting a freakin’ geekin’ EDTracker on top of my bonce for enhanced gameplay while I’m traversin’ the ‘verse.

You might also know that while grinding, killing, truckin’ and questing are all things I love to do, sometimes an opportunity presents itself that I just can’t pass up…

Meet Mr. Frosty, the Sunman:

MrFrosty_GalactusEdition

These binary stars can be found in the Miaplacidus system, and when I saw the angle, I just couldn’t resist. Huge thanks to my wingmates, who all had to perform some fine-tune maneuvers in their shiny new Vultures while I was shouting “Left a bit… Right a bit!” over Skype.

Cast in order of randomness:
CMDR Adyin – Right Eye
CMDR flibblesan – Left Eye
CMDR Zzleezz – Button
CMDR Zebwen – Camera!

If you’re out flying around in the big black, and you see some ships trying to perform some strange maneuver in front of interesting looking spacial bodies. don’t fret. We’re probably just trying to make a winking smiley.

Rich

You can find my original post on the ED forums here.

Static Push: Preface

We tried. We really did.

Tried to do the right thing, to push the boundaries of science, to propel the Human race to new heights.

But we Pushed too far, and something noticed. Something ancient. Something that knew us better than we knew ourselves.

So here we drift, floating on Hope. Only eleven Humans survived the consequences of our hubris.

I am not one of them.

New Cover Art!

I’ve finally managed to get the art to a point I’m happy with. It’ll get tweaked a ton more, I’m sure, but for now I’ve just got to stop fiddling otherwise I’ll go blind. So here it is! The new and improved all-original artwork for Static Push. I hope you like!

CoverNew-Draft3-Smaller

It’s a website, Jim

So I’ve been putting this off for a while now. Exposing a fledgeling hobby to the wilds of the internet and claiming it’s a talent is akin to emptying a bag of flour out of an open window and claiming it’s a cake. But delaying any longer would be like baking that cake without turning the oven on. We’d all be eating gooey uncooked website mixture, which might be tasty, but will eventually give us all indigestion.

That metaphor got away from me a bit.

Let’s segway smoothly into the reason for this cake; I write stuff. And recently I wrote a long bit of stuff about the same thing. This, in some circles, could be called a “book”, although in the circles I move in it’s most often referred to as “get that out of my face” or “did your infant daughter write this?”.

The moral of that story is: I don’t have very nice friends.

Static Push - Cover (Maybe!)

It’s a book! And it’s actually completed, mostly. Feedback from the first three chapters has been extremely promising, and so I’ve been forced to “put myself out there”. And not in the creepy way that results in restraining orders or anything. Not this time.

Static Push is my first novel, exploring the confines of Earth, as well as the loneliness of space and follows the journey of a small group of distinct individuals as they try to survive both.

Written primarily in NaNoWriMo 2014, Static Push is now in editing, but you can get your hands on the first three chapters right here in several formats for your eyeball pleasure.

Please leave comments to let me know what you think, all feedback is good feedback!

Rich

Samples:

Download as Epub Download as PDF