Will we soon have to pay more to see superhero movies?

The highly anticipated version of The Dark Knight by Robert Pattinson was released this Wednesday, March 2 in French cinemas and is already a resounding public success with 260,000 admissions for its first day of operation in France, thus exceeding the start of The Dark Knight in 2008. In the United States, The Batman arrives in theaters today, with already a notable difference. If American viewers attend the screening of the film in an AMC theater, the number 1 cinema complex in North America, they will have to pay $ 1.50 more than if they went to see another film on display in the same cinema. It was Adam Aron, the group’s CEO, who revealed the information without further ado, during the ritual presentation of quarterly results to investors, broadcast in the columns of Entertainment Weekly: “The price of the ticket for The Batman will be slightly higher than other movies playing in the same theaters at the same time. This is fairly new in the US but AMC has been doing this for years in its theaters in Europe, where we charge a bit more the best seats, such as match, concert and theater tickets for example.” If, in our cinemas, a price difference can indeed apply in the same room, it concerns the technologies used, Imax, 3D, o u the placement but in no case the film in question. For the American premiere of the latest opus of the adventures of the batman, one of the AMC cinemas in Los Angeles displayed a base price of 20 dollars (18 euros), or about 7% more than to go see Uncharted – yet a blockbuster – programmed opposite. A revolution announced In 2020, the AMC group had already upset the cinema industry by signing a historic agreement with Universal studios which drastically reduced the time between the first screening of a film and its release on a any digital format, from 90 days to 17 days. More recently, they announced that they would accept payment for cinema tickets in cryptocurrency. With this announcement, they add a new stone to the edifice of the cinema revolution. But in reality, this paradigm shift had been anticipated by several American blockbuster directors. In 2013, during a symposium at the University of Southern California, George Lucas already compared the future of cinemas on Broadway with “fewer rooms but bigger rooms, with many beautiful things. Going to the cinema will cost 50 dollars, maybe 100. Maybe 150. And that will be the “movie industry”. Everything else will be cable television”. see the next Iron Man but probably only $7 to see Lincoln.” Seven years later, Ron Howard, the director of The Da Vinci Code, also abounded in this direction: “The multiplexes are going to become a bit like Broadway. That’s where the most expensive projects will go. the most people in the halls.”