How much do the typical movie theaters (Regal, AMC) make from one ticket? 10%. So when they charge you $9 for a ticket, they only make $.90. It’s no wonder they charge so much for concessions. If they didn’t they wouldn’t stay in business.

This Catch-22 of high prices for the theater industry is forced by production studios. They are the ones requiring 90% of ticket sales, which pretty much requires theaters to charge ridiculously for concessions.

I think the theaters should try to lower prices, which the studios only partially regulate, in order to ease the pain of buying tickets, and hopefully lowering concession prices as well. Then their supply/demand curve might be optimized, and hit a nice equilibrium.

Vote: Cheap. If you don’t like the rules of a business, don’t go there! You have plenty of options on how to watch movies.

I can understand not letting someone bring a pizza in, or a cooler of beer, but come on…you all have lost your minds. If the movies can’t manage a place and make money of their sales of tickets and their concession stand which should be seen as a convenience..yes you pay more, but that’s what you get if you didn’t prepare ahead, kind of like going to an airport.. if that is the case then they should find new management. It’s your responsibility to buy their overpriced popcorn if you don’t want to. And it’s not their right to right to tell you what you stuff in your bag on the way in , unless it is something really illegal…guns, knives, narcotics.

I think people here have lost their minds, really.

Besides water being 3 dollars a bottle, it drives me up the wall that they are still using saccharin sweetner in the diet soft drinks just cause it saves a couple of cents.

They finally went to a mix of artificial sweetners, but I can still taste the saccharin.

If they won’t offer us what we want to eat and drink, it is not being cheap to bring what you want.

Our large popcorn is $4.50 which is lower than most and our large soda is $3.75 and water is $2.00 so I understand that for a couple or a family it is tempting and seemingly reasonable to sneak in food but movies are extremely expensive to show so the concession is really just supplementing the cost of bringing you the films you want to see…if you ever wonder why seemingly successful movie theatres have gone out of business it isn’t hard to figure out…
So, we will often catch people sneaking food and we ask them to either throw it out or place it in their car–that may seem Big Brotherish but without that revenue stream we are out of business next month…

I don’t ’sneak’ in food, but I sure do put a bottle of water in my pocket. This they WILL give you for free, but it’s a teeny tiny cup and comes with a grudging ‘why are you wasting my time’ look from the server. No thanks! G.