"Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn't seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?"<br /><br />We seem to remember Stelios trying to use his "book early" system for cinemas and being completely frozen out a couple of years ago.

"Through New Year’s Eve on Saturday, projected domestic revenues for the year stand at $10.2bn, down 3.5% from 2010′s, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. Taking higher ticket prices into account, movie attendance is off even more, with an estimated 1.28bn tickets sold, a 4.4% decline and the smallest movie audience since 1995, when admissions totaled 1.26bn."

Wonder why sometimes films at multiplexes seem dark for no obvious reason?  "A description of the problem comes from one of several Boston-area projectionists who spoke anonymously due to concerns about his job. We’ll call him Deep Focus. He explains that for 3-D showings a special lens is installed in front of a Sony digital projector that rapidly alternates the two polarized images needed for the 3-D effect to work.<br />
“When you’re running a 2-D film, that polarization device has to be taken out of the image path. If they’re not doing that, it’s crazy, because you’ve got a big polarizer that absorbs 50% of the light.’’