“Who can afford to go to a bad movie anymore?”
You nailed it right there. The price of a ticket (non-matinee) is really high. Many people, unless they’re hard-core movie buffs, won’t shell out that kind of money. The concession stand will take you to the cleaners too.
The last full-run movie I saw was “Olympus Has Fallen” and that was back in March of 2013.
We go to roughly one movie every few years. The last one was Avatar in 3D Imax. Not bad in that format. That was also several years ago.
But when you have a blue ray player, a fairly large flat screen and good sound system - and since we don’t have cable or broadcast tv we don’t see ads for movies - why go to a theater? Seriously.
Also, we can rent for free from the library now and they have thousands of movies avilable.
Another factor is that the novelty of 3-D versions of movies has worn off. With their higher margins from higher ticket prices they drove a big part of the increased box offices in past years.
I have a preteen son. Last couple Summers we saw a LOT of 3-D movies. Now we’re back to standard 2-D (might see Guardians of the Galaxy in 3-D, but it’ll be the only one this year) for the movies we previously would have seen in 3-D, I’ve noticed that the theaters for 2-D are increasingly crowded.
Let me correct that — the price of the ticket isn’t really high, it’s the stupidly large amounts of money being paid to the people starring in the movies (”celebrities”) and to the unionized labor making the movies.