Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2023 January 8

= January 8 =

Identification of music/song in Brendan Kavanagh's "Shouty Station Soothed By A Soulful Sixty Seconds"
What music/song is it in "Shouty Station Soothed By A Soulful Sixty Seconds" (2022-11-29), e.g. at 01 min 16 secs?

There might be a hint at 00 min 36 secs.

--Mortense (talk) 02:20, 8 January 2023 (UTC)


 * OK, I found it: Greensleeves. A version
 * --Mortense (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * --Mortense (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes. The pianist actually names the song at the start of it, about 40 seconds in. It's also the tune to a Christmas carol called "What Child Is This?". He also states that "Greensleeves" was written by Henry VIII, which is apparently a myth. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:49, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Cinema ticket price difference depending on length of the film
In the USA, how much (in average) is the difference in the price of the cinema tickets depending on the length of the film? Special interest of my question is the difference between the most successful films this year: Avatar: The Way of Water (182 min) and Top Gun: Maverick (131 min). --KnightMove (talk) 11:30, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Do you have any evidence that cinemas in the US are operating such a pricing strategy? --Viennese Waltz 14:30, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * No. It is just usual in Austria to charge more for films with extra length. If this is not done at all in the USA, this answer is perfectly fine with me. This question Quora: Why do all movies' tickets cost the same? and answers there indeed imply that there is no such practice in the USA. --KnightMove (talk) 14:59, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I lived in Austria for ten years and I never heard of such a thing. This webpage lists the prices of a cinema I used to go to frequently, the Cineplexx Donauzentrum, and shows that there is no variation in price by the length of the film. --Viennese Waltz 15:14, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Please scroll to the bottom of that very page: "Bei Filmen mit Überlänge gelten erhöhte Eintrittspreise..." This is default for all Cineplexx theaters and also others - of course I don't know all of them. --KnightMove (talk) 15:21, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I didn't see that, apologies. Still, I never had to pay more for a longer film in all the time I lived in your wonderful country. --Viennese Waltz 16:27, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I will try to find out what even the limit of "extended length" is. --KnightMove (talk) 18:17, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * In the US, ticket prices vary due to time of showing (matinees are cheaper) and theater used (IMAX theaters are more expensive). I have never encountered such a length based price differential.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:46, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
 * In the 80s, there was a Gandhi movie that ran over 3 hours. The movie theaters near me split it into two movies, essentially charging twice the ticket price to see the entire movie. But, that is an oddity. Theaters do not profit from ticket sales. They profit from concession sales. So, they have no concern with raising ticket prices. As an example, I was a supervisor at a theater and had to put ticket sales info into the distributor spreadsheet. We paid a percent in city, county, state, and federal taxes. We paid a shipping percent, a distributor percent, and a producer percent. Adding all those percents together came out to nearly 100%. Now, add in the cost to operate the theater and every time a movie was played, the theater lost money, regardless of ticket sales. Concessions kept the theater in business. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 15:12, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
 * [//sports.yahoo.com/finance-expert-explains-movie-theaters-203601319.html] suggests it's more complicated than that with smaller outlets relying primarily on concession sales but large chains like AMC make more from ticket sales (although still making decent amounts from concession sales). It does mention (and I've seen others claiming this) that distributors tend to take a higher percentage early on. (And this is generally when ticket sales are highest, so I've seen others claiming movies which are able to sustain good audiences for a long while are generally better than those which massive early crowds but which soon taper off.) I have no idea how reliable the random TikToker it cites is OTOH, I see no reason to think they're less reliable than a random editor. Note that while it talks about revenue rather than profits and I'm not an expert in business. it doesn't seem to me to make sense to put all the costs of operating a cinema into the ticket sales rather than spread it out. A cinema is not a food outlet and I'm fairly sure by far the vast majority of customers only buy concessions because they're going to watch something. So the costs of operation shouldn't just come out of ticket revenue but also concessions since they're part of the costs of getting people to buy expensive popcorn etc. I mean it especially makes no sense to put all staff or contractor costs including cleanup into ticket sales.  To put things, a different way while I assume the distributors have some say in ticket prices since sources do seem to agree with you they often receive a percentage [//www.aarp.org/entertainment/movies-for-grownups/info-2019/why-do-movie-tickets-cost-so-much.html] and perhaps part of their deals with other cinemas also require certain prices and independently there are various reasons why they might like certain prices even if they would get the same money either way, it seems likely large chains like AMC probably do often have the ability to lower ticket prices by reducing their share of the ticket perhaps even down to zero. This wouldn't necessarily increase concession sales in fact it could even depress them, but even if it did increase sales, it doesn't automatically follow that it's a sound business strategy. (See also [//www.indiewire.com/2022/10/movie-ticket-price-average-11-dollars-1234765924/].)  BTW since the original question only concerns the US it seems fine to ignore them in responses. However when we consider them it likely gets even more complicated. For example, this from the UK [//www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/advice-support/how-to-start-a-cinema/the-economics-of-the-operation/] seems to suggest ticket sales would be a big part of the income for a relative small cinema. While I assume given the focus of the site, it's primarily thinking of independent films rather than big Hollywood box office ones and may also have a reason to overestimate how much money you can make, it still seems to be a valid data point.  OTOH this [//www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5EDMewFq4I] seems far more questionable. It's from a "Brit" but given the currency and pictures etc seems to be talking about the US. It then comes to a conclusion no one else has mentioned, that most money comes from advertising. It's unclear what data they have to support this claim which frankly flies in the face of a lot of other stuff including the ICO data which did include advertising but also e.g. [//www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/cinema-ad-spend-is-growing-faster-than-other-formats---china-dominates.html] [//digiday.com/media/cinema-advertising-hopes-to-get-close-to-pre-pandemic-ad-revenue-totals-with-new-tools-services/] [//www.statista.com/statistics/243147/cinema-advertising-revenue-in-the-us/] [//dashtwo.com/cinema-advertising/] [//advertising-excellence.com/cinema-advertising/]. Note also like with concession sales, it's unclear to me it makes any sense to ignore the costs it takes to get people watching the advertising in the first place i.e. the costs of showing the movie people are actually there to see.  Nil Einne (talk) 09:49, 11 January 2023 (UTC)