
4 Summer Movie Alternatives To The Multiplex
PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Welcome to summer blockbuster season, movie fans. Sit back and enjoy the gouging.
Listen, there's no question this is a lucrative time of year for movie studios, and getting more lucrative with each warm-weather slate of blockbusters. Back in summer of 2002, when Sony's original recipe Tobey Maguire
Spider-Man
raked in nearly $404 million at U.S. box offices, the movie industry as a whole squeezed summer patrons for nearly $3.6 billion, according to
BoxOfficeMojo
. A decade later, with
Disney's
(DIS) - Get Report
The Avengers
at the top of the heap with $623 million in box office receipts last year, the summer movie industry swelled to a $4.3 billion affair.
Yet, in the bigger picture, those numbers are strictly OK. In 2002, 3-D and
IMAX
(IMAX) - Get Report
weren't squeezing every potential dollar out of movie audiences. In fact, the industry only produced 157 movies in summer 2002 compared with the 221 it released last summer alone. The blockbusters and more benign arthouse releases of summer 2002 averaged $22.9 million apiece, compared with the relatively scant $19.5 million a pop brought in by the films of summer 2012.
The sad truth that gigaplex owners have been dealing with for some time is that fewer people are going to see their movies overall. In 2002, the movie industry sold 1.576 billion tickets with
Spider-Man
leading the way. By last year, even
The Avengers
and Batman couldn't make Americans buy more than 1.36 billion tickets. That's up from the 1.28 billion sold in 2011, but still part of a steady decline.
So what's wrong? Is it really just high definition, Blu-ray and $8-a-month streaming sucking away customers? A little. In the past decade, the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. rose to $7.96 from $5.81. That's
average
; folks plunking down $20 for 3-D showings or $14 just to get in the door of big-city multiplexes know it's far worse.
That high price of entry is also shrinking moviegoers' options. As the movie industry forces a switch to all-digital format from film, small theaters are forced to either make costly upgrades just to keep up or bow out altogether. As a result, the 5,712 theaters that existed in the U.S. in 2002 have dwindled to roughly 5,300 even as the number of screens expanded from 35,000 to nearly 39,000, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.
Regal
(RGC)
,
AMC
,
Carmike
(CKEC)
and
Cinemark
(CNK) - Get Report
face their own struggles, but still fare better than their smaller competitors.
Still, those smaller competitors are out there and still giving moviegoers a viable and, in some cases, cheaper alternative to the multiplex. Here are just five other options for summer movie audiences this season:
Drive-Ins
We're going to be as kind about this as possible: Drive-Ins aren't dying off wholesale, but it's not looking good, either.
At one point, there were 4,000 drive-in theaters across the country, according to
. Rising real estate values and shrinking audiences have since whittled that to just 368 last year, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.
Even worse, the
reports that 90% of those drive-ins haven't converted to digital projectors and may not have the capital to spend the $70,000 per screen for each devices. As a result,
found that numerous drive-ins have turned to fundraising site
Kickstarter
,
(FB) - Get Report
and
their own sites
to solicit donations for projectors and potentially save their businesses.
The remaining American drive-ins have survived by getting creative. Tinny or nonfunctional window speakers have been replaced by radio signals. The
M-F Drive-In in Milton-Freewater, Ore.,
still charges by the carload, while the
Warwick Drive-In
in Warwick, N.Y., just north of New Jersey offers free Wi-Fi.
They'll appreciate your business this summer, but may need a donation if you want to visit again in 2014.
Second-run theaters
In just as much trouble as their drive-in counterparts, these $1-to-$4 theaters are getting squeezed from all sides.
keeps tabs on more than 300 such theaters across the country, but there are untold others just scraping by. Video-on-demand services from
Comcast's
(CMCSA) - Get Report
,
Time Warner Cable
(TWC)
,
DirecTV
(DTV)
,
Dish Network
(DISH) - Get Report
and others keep encroaching on their release schedule. On-demand streaming services from
Amazon
(AMZN) - Get Report
,
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
iTunes and
Wal-Mart's
(WMT) - Get Report
Vudu have also turned up the pressure.
Now, as
last year, there's a chance 1,000 theaters -- many carrying second-run movies -- will close their doors for good. The North American Theater Association estimates that 20% of theaters in America -- or 10,000 screens -- won't make the conversion and will go dark.
That leaves the rest to find a way to convert or close. While discount theaters remain a bargain that still undercuts the price of on-demand services, it's going to take something bigger to keep them alive and relevant. That leads us to ...
Theater pubs
There are vastly different takes on this idea throughout the country, but the basic premise is the same: Provide dinner and booze with the movie and people will stick around.
On the East Coast, this idea exists as
Showcase Cinemas
' Cinema de Luxe. At a string of theaters in Massachusetts, a
of plush seats is equipped with a server call button that brings an attendant over to take your order for appetizers, burgers, entrees, desserts, wine, beer or cocktails. Showcase has stocked other locations with its
bar for pre- and post-movie noshing and boozing and its
for more downmarket fare.
Smaller theaters, including the
Dunellen Theater & Cinema Cafe in Dunellen, N.J.,
dispense with the formalities and offer moviegoers pizza and beer at tables between rows. It's an idea that's caught on from
to
, but has become ingrained in the culture in Portland, Ore. Not only is the city and the surrounding suburbs home to the
chain of theater pubs that includes the palatial Baghdad Theater and the converted Kennedy School elementary school, but it's also teeming with similar, smaller independent theaters such as the neon-covered
, the cozy
, cult favorite
and the armchair-laden arthouse known as
.
Some will cook you pizza, others will offer deviled egg plates and panini, but all have beer on tap and wine if you want it. Kids are invited to most during the day, but knowing you can go to a kid-free showing of
Wreck-It Ralph
after 8 p.m. and enjoy it with a pint of porter is oddly comforting.
First-run movies at home
If you just want to surrender and accept the fact that multiplexes are taking over and the chatty, smartphone-lit experience they provide is prohibitively grating, maybe it's best not to leave the house.
If you hate other people's noise and idiosyncrasies enough to pay your way out of it, however,
Prima Cinema
is more than willing to take your money in exchange for cinematic peace. For $35,000, the company will give you a digital box that delivers films over the Internet and into your home theater.
Those films cost $500 a pop and you can watch them only once during a 24-hour span, but it's already showing
Fast and the Furious 6
and has
Kick-Ass 2
and
Despicable Me 2
coming soon. Granted, because it's a partnership between Comcast's Universal Pictures, a venture capital firm and
Best Buy's
(BBY) - Get Report
investment group, your choices are going to be somewhat limited. Oh, and setting up a home theater that would make the experience worthwhile could run you six figures even without the Prima box.
That said, you'd still be among an elite few outside the Bel-Air courier route of studio execs, producers, actors and other industry types who'd have legal access to first-run films while they're in theaters. It's not cheap, but it definitely comes with more bragging rights than watching
Iron Man 3
for $3 bucks three months after its release.
-- Written by Jason Notte in Portland, Ore.
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Jason Notte is a reporter for TheStreet. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Esquire.com, Time Out New York, the Boston Herald, the Boston Phoenix, the Metro newspaper and the Colorado Springs Independent. He previously served as the political and global affairs editor for Metro U.S., layout editor for Boston Now, assistant news editor for the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J., editor of Go Out! Magazine in Hoboken, N.J., and copy editor and lifestyle editor at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, N.J.








