Ethanol Fuel Demands Will Send Your Movie Ticket Prices Skyrocketing
"Thanks to the inflating cost of popcorn, the price of movie tickets is expected to skyrocket by as much as 30% this year, according to Ricard Gil, a University of Santa Cruz economist who studies the business. 'You're going to see a one- to two-dollar increase in the price of a movie ticket,' he said. 'And that's being conservative.'
"'They're going to lose some of their customers,' Mr. Gil said. 'Some of them are just not going to go to the movies.'
"This is terra incognita for the movie-theater business. Ticket sales had been insulated for the past 30 years from both inflation and recession." [AdAge]
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Editorial Director
popcorn is probably the only US commodity (apart from corn itself) where the price of corn is a major part of the cost of the product (There's about six cents of corn in a box of cornflakes). Perhaps people will keep the popcorn in the bag rather than spreading it liberally over the floors and seats if the price goes up.
I don't quite understand why this would cause ticket prices to skyrocket. We buy popcorn separately, it's not included in the price. Why wouldn't it just increase at the concession stand? Seems like just an excuse to raise prices again to try to bump grosses since ticket numbers go down.
I guess this is why there is an old adage that the only reason we have economists is to make astrologists look better……. A typical large box of popcorn contains less than a dime of actual corn, so a doubling of the corn cost would add less than 10 cents to a $5 box…or about a 2% increase. I have no idea about the profitability of the movie business but to somehow blame this on ethanol is beyond stupid.
Couldn't they raise the price of the popcorn instead :p
This is some serious PROPAGANDA B.S. … and one of the most ridiculous articles I've ever read. A popcorn farmer receives $.13/lb. of unpopped popcorn (yes, that's 13 cents for one pound of unpopped popcorn!!) that he or she sells. How exactly does that translate into a $5.00 bag of popped popcorn the end consumer pays for in a movie theater? It doesn't even require a full pound of unpopped popcorn to produce the bag of popcorn sold in a movie theater! So, even if unpopped popcorn doubles in price, that would mean a price increase of about 2 cents per bag of popped popcorn at the theater. Movie theaters make approximately 70% of their profits through outrageously marked-up concessions, and they have to do that because movie studios retain the majority of ticket revenues. So, don't blame popcorn and ethanol (which isn't even made from popcorn) for the skyrocketing prices of movie theater concessions.