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July 27, 2005 In the first part of this article I mentioned some of the many things that are wrong about going to movies in the present. Interestingly enough I did not get to the expensive ticket price. My father-in-law, who is 75 years old, still tells us about going to the movies all day for a quarter with his sister – to be in air conditioning. This article is not about what is wrong with movie theaters. It is about the things that I think that can happen to make people want to go to movie theaters again in droves. An analogy for the movie theaters to follow is very simple. During my lifetime supermarkets have gone from uniformly dingy floors that were at some point white, utilitarian shelving and customer service aimed to displease. At some point in my life someone said ‘Hey, we can make this a nice place where people don’t mind going to shop and we’ll out-perform our competitors.’ This began the great supermarket wars. Being first to upgrade was not always a surety of good performance, but it did guarantee that until your competitors upgraded you stole lots of their customers. Now there are places like Wegmans that may charge a premium for their groceries, but provide an enjoyable experience for shopping. My 2 year old son loves going there to see the Garden Scale toy train chugging along suspended from the ceiling. It was the place of choice for eating lunch at a workplace I was at because it was close enough to work and we could get all sorts of different things for lunch. Movie theaters have to undergo a similar process to supermarkets, but they have to do it even stronger because people do not ‘have’ to go to the movies where often they have to go to the supermarket. Here are some points that movie theaters can implement to bring back the crowds and the dollars. 1. Do not make so many movies. Concentrate on a new mantra: Quality is better than quantity. Make more than one movie a year that encourages people to think. 2. Seating is a major problem. The vast majority of the time the theaters are not sold-out. Designing the seating around the sell-out capacity (and maximizing ticket sales for high volume movies) for those brief spurts when a hot movie is in forces poor seating on everyone when they go to see lower selling movies that are out throughout the entire year. Imagine for a moment leather (or fake leather) recliner seats that are well padded, adequate cup-holders for the drinks and hidden tables that are actually useful. Imagine for a moment the comfort level in the theater being high enough that despite the cost it is really nice to go and see a movie in the theater. 3. Hire people that care. How do you hire people that care? You offer to pay them. You train them and there should be an avenue for advancement. Survey the customers to find out what you are doing right and wrong and if necessary – who did it. 4. Monitor the movie experience from remote locations. Monitor both audio quality and decibels by using sensors and have tolerances as to when things are too loud and when things are too quiet. 5. Movies should be an experience. Be a part of the movie with your staff. Decorate the theater in accordance to the big movies that are playing. Have employees stop and re-enact scenes from both current and past movies with a little projector that everyone can see and hear. Yes, indeed many of these will be bad and cause laughter. But this is a very good thing. I am not asking your average employee to be an actor. I am asking them to stop and say a couple lines together and play act it out. Sometimes humorous, sometimes really well done and sometimes as a question asking ‘where did this scene come from?’ – it barely matters as long as it is done with pride and offers the theater customer an experience. It might even help people ignore the huge line they are on because that one billion dollar movie is playing tonight and everyone’s got to wait. It might encourage participation between your customers and your employees – asking questions and who knows – even requesting employees to re-enact scenes from movies! 6. Do something about the food. There is an enormous opportunity that people could eat in a restaurant that is part of the theater. No need to worry about being late for the movie. Register with your server the movie and time you are going to see. Make going out to see a movie a classy experience. Research the idea of people eating a meal in the theater and what kind of delivery mechanism this would require. 7. No commercials. This was an insipid idea at best and a terror that might never be removed from customers once recognized as a revenue generator. 8. Fix the previews. I have seen plenty of movies on the basis of previews. And each one that showed something that did not happen in the movie that was on the preview has pissed me, the customer off. Previews should contain footage of the movies as they are in the movie. Don’t take segments from completely unrelated parts of the film and squash the dialog together. Then when I see the movie I’m like – ok there is no way the dialog in the preview happened that way – the one character died in the first five minutes. Now I seldom go to the movies and what I do see, I rent from Netflix. 9. Make every movie theater something different. There are positive and negative points to the homogenization of our world cultures. Positive is that regionally we all speak the same language, know how to purchase movie theater tickets and what to expect when we go to the movies. It is negative in that everything is so boring so the same that going to the theater in Denver, Colorado is insignificantly different than going to the movies in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Try this; in some theaters have a 10,000 gallon aquarium. Pitch it as the largest aquarium inside a movie theater and put some interesting sea life in it. Or this; team up with a local petting zoo and when you have a great children’s movie have some animals in the theater for kids to remember the experience. 10. Lay off the whole mindset that everyone’s got to see it on opening weekend. To be a successful business you want consistently good ticket sales – not boom and bust cycles. When you go with boom and bust cycles, you create a situation where the theaters view the 90% of the time they do not have blockbuster movies as costs and the 10% of the time they do have blockbuster movies as ‘sell as many tickets as possible so we maximize our profits’. This creates a poor movie going experience as you are stuffed in to the same small and high number of seats that you would have to endure for blockbuster movies while you see a movie that has 10 people in the theater. You want people to want to come to the movies once a week. Not millions of people one weekend of the year. 11. Annoy the directors of films. There is a connection with high-paced scene changes with ADD. There is no race to see who can put the most scene changes in a minute. Flashing lights do little to get movie viewers involved with the movie. Please anyone that has comments on this article feel free to contact me. If you have an idea to contribute but don’t want to write an article on the movie theaters I will do my best to incorporate it in to a future article on this subject. And certainly if there were any problems in the writing of this article feel free to contact me and indicate that there was something I should have fixed. ------------ About the author Alexander Flynn: I am currently a Senior Consultant who writes ABAP code in SAP and .NET code in Visual Studio.NET in New Jersey. Email: rhadamygg@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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