The ticket for Interstellar at the Point cinema in Dublin last week was €12. Good value, I thought – about a third less than I pay in London. But I’d got it wrong. Twelve euros was the price for two tickets, so the cost was just £4.80 each. Admittedly this was a midweek night, not a Friday or Saturday, but for the same film on the same day at my local in south London, the Clapham Picturehouse, it would have been £13.10, or nearly three times as much.
Are we in Britain being ripped off by the cinema chains? After my Dublin experience I researched what it might cost to see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, the latest episode of the blockbuster series simultaneously opening in screens worldwide this weekend. The results were depressing, with Brits expected to pay the highest prices for tickets – yet the ushers checking the tickets and trying to sell overpriced popcorn on top are probably on minimum wages and zero-hour contracts.
Maybe you want the big screen, city centre experience. In Paris, about the most central you can get is the Gaumont on the Champs-Élysées. Sure enough, it’s showing The Hunger Games, and with the booking fee included the price is €11.80 per person – or just over £9.40 in sterling. Unlike most British cinemas, it also gives discounts to the under-26s, who pay €7.20 – or just £5.75.
Now let’s take two 25-year-olds out for a Saturday night in the West End of London. The Odeon West End is showing the same film, but (take a deep breath) the price is £17.90 a ticket, with no discounts for under-26s. So our couple would pay £35.80 in central London but £11.50 in central Paris.
Perhaps we’re being unfair. Leicester Square in London has probably some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. “The economics of running a cinema in Leicester Square – as opposed to Leicester – are very different. Business rates, staff and supplier costs all vary hugely,” said a spokesman for the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association when I asked him to explain why we are paying so much.
So my next comparison was with New York. I don’t imagine the rates, the staff costs, or the property costs can be any lower in Times Square than in Leicester Square. So what is the AMC Times Square charging for The Hunger Games this weekend? $19.99 a ticket, or £12.75 – a third less than the Odeon here.
Now let’s look outside of the capital or in smaller European cities. The Odeon Metrocentre in Newcastle is charging £10.80 a ticket this weekend, while the Vue in Inverness wants £9.25. But if I were to go to the Capitol in Bologna, the price would be €8.50 (£6.80). The Savoy in Dublin, Ireland’s biggest screen, also charges €8.50.
The best value is, once again, in Germany, which contrives to have higher wages and lower housing and grocery costs than the UK. The Berlin KinoWelt, in the centre of the city, charges just €8.30, or £6.60. Ah, maybe it’s a small independent without the price-gouging we’ve come to expect from multinational operators. But no, the KinoWelt is owned by UCI, part of the Odeon group headquartered in the UK, and owned by a private equity group, Terra Firma. So the same company that expects Londoners to cough up £17.90 for The Hunger Games this weekend charges Berliners a third of the price.
The Cinema Exhibitors’ Association says the average price for a ticket in the UK is £6.72, and adds that the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway all have higher prices than us (without adding they all have much higher wages, too). But even in Oslo, a famously expensive city, a ticket is 120 kroner – £11.30, or less than you’d pay in Clapham.
But the price elasticity of cinema-goers in Britain is not infinite – and there’s some evidence it has snapped already. Cinema visits in Britain are down 10% this year on last year. The head of Lionsgate UK, the company behind The Hunger Games, told the BBC last week that “something drastic” was needed to reverse falling admissions.
How about lower prices?
