Miscellaneous Movie Musings the Sequel

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

State-of-the-art is NOT extra. It's what I'm paying for when I attend a first-run theater. And the last time I experienced a movie in a first run-theater that did not have bitchin', quality, and ultra-loud sound was in 1976, before Star Wars changed all that forever.

It's extra over what's in a non-first-run theater. And in fact you have NOT been paying for it, at least not in full. You've been paying for a PORTION of it, the rest being subsidized by the fact that a ticket for the non-first-run auditoriums, which offer a lower quality experience, are the same price. Purely from a standpoint of paying for what you're getting, you "should" have been paying more for that ticket all along, but for marketing reasons that hasn't been happening.

Again, simply because you've acclimated to how it's been done for 30 years doesn't mean they can't change it. For a long time, if you signed a contract, nearly all cell phones were free or some nominal amount significantly less than their retail price. But once there was more differentiation between phones, and premium phones like the iPhone came to be, that changed. Yeah, you still get the premium phones at a subsidize discount below retail, but not anywhere near the deep discount that was standard before. On top of that, there's greater range in pricing and fewer and fewer phones are free anymore. Yeah, it sucked as a consumer that you could not longer get a pretty good phone for free, or a really good phone for slightly more than free. But that doesn't mean the carriers weren't within their rights to alter the price structure in response to new market forces.