Moviegoers Want Low Ticket Prices

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 15, 6:32AM EST

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Moviegoers want lower ticket prices. This obvious conclusion is part of a new study by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The study, part of the PwC Consumer Intelligence Survey, attempts to discover why people go to movie theater, why the want to stream movies and how they pick the movies to attend.

The four conclusions of the study: 1) people believe they go to movies in theaters as often as they did a year ago, 2) people tend to attend movies that are based on the “genre” they like, 3) people want “incentives” to attend movies or see the same movies at home when the theater version is released, and 4) reviews and other media comments about films do little to get people to attend one movie versus another. The trend of the habits fluctuates somewhat by the age of the respondents.

Most of the conclusions are obvious. PwC need not have wasted money or resources on the research.

The best observation from the study:

But nothing is as motivating as lowering ticket prices.

Also:

Last-minute cheap seats caught everyone’s attention as a good movie theater perk.

That puts movies in the same category as sports events and the ballet or opera. Described another way, people are motivated because they are stingy.

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The single best piece of news for movie theater owners:

Despite the variety of ways consumers can view movies, most people who saw a top summer movie watched it in a movie theater versus another venue.

Theater owners face the economic trouble that most other consumer-focused businesses do. People want to spend less money to consume. Less revenue drives lower margins, or even losses. These trends are occurring at a time when theaters have to compete with DVDs and new streaming services like those offered by Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), and they have to compete on price.

The study also contains a bit of bad news for movie producers. Moviegoers want better quality films. That means studios need to forecast what movies people want to see. As history shows, studios are wrong as often as they are right.

Thanks to PwC, people who care about the movie industry, particularly those who make money on films, get a new road map of strategies and tactics — a road map that the industry already has.

Methodology: This report summarizes key findings from a 1,044-respondent survey conducted in October to November 2014, exploring the topic of year-over-year theatrical box office decline in summer of 2014.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.