Leaving the quality of the movies out of it for the moment, there are plenty of other reasons not to go to a movie. Price is a good one, but not even the best. And I'm not even talking necessarily about the price of the ticket; you have to expect those to rise just like the price of everything else rises with time. But the concessions are highway robbery, pure and simple. Yesterday at
Serenity, it was $3.55 for a large Coke. (And you have to get the large just to have any actual liquid in the cup around all the ice.
) I can get the same size (or larger) drink down the street at the local Kwik-E-Mart for around a buck, maybe even less if it's on sale, and put as much or as little ice as I want in it. Never mind the equally inflated prices on candy, popcorn, or anything else you might want to snack on.
Then, you move into the theater, where they're using playing bad music and showing ads and stupid movie trivia questions via slide projector. The projectors are usually out of focus and shooting either too high or too low on the screen. As an A/V guy, that just bothers me.
Then, the commercials come on.
Commercials. I understand why they're advertising Coke, because they're trying to sell you one at a 1000% markup, but "body fragrances?" (Whatever the hell those even
are?) And what's with this "Fandango" thing? The movie theater is advertising another way to buy tickets? How does that even work? Then the trailers, which I used to like, but now either tell you the entire plot of the film or nothing at all about it. These days, trailers turn me off to movies more than they make me want to attend one--even the
Serenity ad that played on TV was starting to turn me off to the film.
Finally, a good twenty minutes after the start time printed in the paper, the movie starts. These days, if it's not a sequel to a movie that shouldn't have even been made in the first place, it's a remake of an old movie or an old TV show. The last movie I went to before
Serenity, I even forget now what it was, I looked around the theater, and literally all the posters were for a movie in one of those three categories. Duece Bigalow, Bad News Bears, Bewitched, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory... it's enough to make a guy swear off movies forever. Are there no new ideas left in Hollywood? Or at least a way to take an old idea and put it in a new package, as Whedon did with
Serenity? Apparently not...
All in all, it just makes me that much more determined, when I finally get a house of my own, to start putting a home theater together. Maybe I can avoid going to movies entirely at that point...