When its $10.50 per ticket, and its $22 to buy the blu-ray, my interest in going to the theater wans dramatically.

In that sense, they are still getting my money just in different form. About 5 years ago I used to see about 15-18 movies in the theater every year and buy 3-4 DVDs. Now I go see about 5 movies in the theater and buy about 15 DVDs.

The person that loses out is the theater owner not the studio. But then as has been pointed out that is where the value isn’t being added. At home, I have more comfort, better sounds, TV viewing angle, the ability to pause if I need to take a leak, which I need to do less at home because I am not mindlessly sipping on a gallon of coke.

I can make my flippant comments to my wife without bothering other people or being bothered by other people that are doing the same thing or taking it “too far” with their technology or above whisper voices, etc.

I’ve had 50+ dollars in movie vouchers accumulated as gifts over the past 1-2 years. Mind you going to see a movie would cost me NOTHING and I’ve still only seen 2 movies in theater in 2 years.

THAT’S how bad the experience is. How hard is it for the industry to figure out that their product just isn’t as valuable as the ludicrous prices they set?

In the first place, Kevin Drum has an interesting observation that movie revenue is becoming more and more concentrated in the opening weekend, and that films are catering to “Teenagers who are eager for something to do on Friday night and don’t really care much about subtleties like theme and character development.”

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/12/la-times-chart-proves-movies-are-getting-worse-and-worse

That is correct, of course. A theater, like a restaurant, or any other place of entertainment, naturally caters to people who were going out anyway, not to someone who has to be induced to go out at all. It is much less difficult and expensive to divert a customer from an alternative place of entertainment, than to attract people who were not proposing to go at all. This is not a new thing. On the contrary, it is very old thing. Most of the comments people have made about why they don’t want to go to the movies are not new. They describe, equally well, certain segments of the live theater before the invention of motion pictures.
If you look at what a theater looked like, circa 1800 or 1850, the seating was mostly “boxes,” little rooms, or inside porches, with perhaps half a dozen seats each, and these boxes offered a degree of privacy to little parties of the audience. These boxes were stacked anything up to eight layers high. A common accessory were “opera glasses,” telescopes or binoculars enabling one to get a good view of the stage from about a hundred feet away. The different tiers of seats had separate entrances and stairways leading to them, and were priced differently, according to the height. Private coaches could pull up to the various entrances, and the passengers could get out and go in the door, while the coachmen drove away somewhere to wait. In sociological terms, there was not the equivalent of a parking lot. The boxes were effectively a kind of television viewing avant le lettre, so to speak. An illustration of London’s Pantheon theater, circa 1800, shows the Royal Box on the third deck, a safe height above the Pit (see below). At one point, George IV was hissed from the pit below, just after he had divorced his wife, but it didn’t go further than that.

What we now think of as theater seating was known as the “pit,” in the space between the boxes and the stage, and it was exclusively the domain of unattached young men, typically students, the kind of young men who spontaneous picked up arms and fought in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Alexandre Dumas the Elder was a charter member of this class. The term “musketeer” was apt to be applied, generically, to the kind of young men we are talking about. Aramis, Porthos, Athos, D’Artagnan, and one might add, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac, were recognized as archetypes of the footloose young man of respectable birth somewhere in the provinces, with no commitments, and free for any wild adventure. They were also the class who threw things such as rotten vegetables at the actors they did not like. The whole tone was straight Fraternity House, in short.

Of course, really rich people, starting with the King, could arrange private performances in their private theaters in their own houses, and often did. For that matter, amateur theatricals, for an audience of friends and family, were a popular recreation. When the rich people came to the public theater, it was in large part for the purpose of being seen, and attempting to maintain a national community with themselves at the head. Women, in particular, wanted to show off their expensive clothing. Men had other motives, the theater being the best place to find a strumpet. One of the curiosities of the time was that the theater was a point of confrontation between the expensively virtuous wife, maintained in idleness, and her husband’s human sex toy.

Intellectually speaking, the theater was at a pretty low ebb at the time. It was not being used to popularize ideas, except for the special case of Germany, and the special case of ideas appealing primarily to very young men, eg. Victor Hugo’s _Hernani_. It was not like Shakespeare’s theater. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the two obvious heirs to Shakespeare’ mantle were two novelists, Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, who had, respectively been a lawyer and a newspaper reporter. Even people who could not read themselves could pay someone to read to them, typically in a group while they worked. For example, in 1815, a young bookseller’s apprentice named William Chambers, who would eventually go on to found a publishing house, earned his breakfast every morning by going to spend a couple of hours reading aloud for a group of bakers while they baked the day’s bread.

The theater tended to a high level of spectacle (ie. special effects). It wasn’t Shakespeare’s theater in the round, but a modern stage-house with winches capable of lowering painted scenery into place, elaborate furniture hauled onto the stage from the wings, and elaborate costumes, and a full orchestra. In addition to this, there was about as much sex as the censor would allow, with female performers who wore much less than almost any other woman of the time would wear in public, and who were themselves on sale after the performance. By contrast, words had become much less important. The basic commodity was musical theater, that is, Opera, and an equally vital element was the ballet performance incorporated in each show. Like the first-run movie in our time, it had tended to become childish, not in the G-rated sense, but in the sense of not addressing the scope of adult thought and action. In a provincial music hall, serious drama, eg. Shakespeare, was apt to be combined in a program with music hall turns, meaning one act of a Shakespeare play, and then something lighter. This was of course adapted to an audience which could read Shakespeare, and had been compelled to read Shakespeare in school, so they already knew how the story came out, and wanted to get an idea of what the play looked and sounded like on a stage. New serious dramatists did not have the advantage of being in the school curriculum, of course.

In England, established “highbrow” theaters, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, which had endowments and government subventions like a school or college, and which could afford to present, in its entirety, a Shakespeare play lasting two hours, came much later, say from 1875-1925. As a nineteenth-century London theater manager observed: “Shakespeare spells ruin, and Byron bankruptcy.” By this, he meant full-length plays, not the judicious ten or twenty minutes of out-takes which a provincial theater would have done. There was no sizable audience which could take serious drama in more than small doses, well diluted in junk and the audience’s favorite kind of soft pornography.

In the long span of time, what happened was that movies temporarily inserted themselves into a niche between theatrical performances and books. However, movies are gradually being assimilated to one category or the other. Some kinds of movies are naturally viewed on a laptop computer screen, pausing and rewinding to look at certain portions more closely, and these are in effect a kind of book. Other kinds of movies are essentially spectacular, and are about the dynamics of a crowd of spectators in a theater. No theatrical experience, movies included, has ever matched, or will ever match, the sheer wealth of material in books.

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_Memoir of Robert Chambers, with autobiographic reminiscences of William Chambers_ (1872)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Chambers_(publisher_born_1802)
http://www.archive.org/details/memoirofrobertch00cham

p. 94, (Hat Tip: The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, ed. James Sutherland, 1975, 1976)
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George Bernard Shaw, Love Among the Artists

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Shakespeare_Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_National_Theatre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_theatre

“F. B. Chatterton’s 1878 resignation; in his words, ‘Shakespeare spells ruin, and Byron bankruptcy.'”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_Royal,_Drury_Lane
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