CINEMA'S PRICES

Two weeks ago, the ‘’Fiesta del Cine’’ or ‘’Cinema’s party’’ was held, concretely on the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th of November. This was the 9^th edition of this celebration, which consists of reducing the price of a cinema’s ticket from an average of 6.50€ to only 2.90€. The only thing you need to enjoy this reduction is to get your accreditation online.

Because of this celebration, I wanted to talk about the price of the cinema nowadays in Spain. First of all, not only talking about the cinema, in Spain, for the cultural things there is a 21% of IVA, which is a lot compared to other countries in the European Union. At the beginning of 2015, the government said they were going to low it and there would be a 10% of IVA, but I truly don’t know if this was actually into effect. The high taxes on the cultural things makes reduce the people performing all these cultural activities, and in consequence, it reduces the level of culture in the country. But this is another topic to talk about, in this post I wanted to specially talk about the cinema.

A part from the IVA issue, the price of the cinema tickets has increased a lot during the past years, and I think this is a disadvantage for everyone.

The people don’t go to the cinema because it’s too expensive; the cinemas don’t have people so they can’t earn enough money and at the same time, the producers, film studio and the ones who are involved on the film, receive a lower amount of money. Because of this lack of money, the cinemas increase the prices, but this makes less people go to the cinema. And that’s a vicious circle.

I’m not an expert on this topic, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but I think it would be something good to lower the prices. It would be hard at the beginning because especially the cinemas would probably lose quite a lot of money, but doing this, more people would go to the cinema and more often, so cinemas would earn more money with the tickets. And apart from this, people normally buy snacks in the cinema, something that produces a benefit for the cinema. So, putting random numbers, saying that everyday 10 people go to the cinema and the ticket costs 8€, they are going to earn 80€. And if we count that everyone spends 5€ on snacks, they are getting 130€ per day. If they lower the prices and each ticket costs 5€, we say that everyday 20 people go to the cinema and they spend the same 5€ on snacks, they finally get a total of 150€ per day. Of course, those numbers are invented and maybe they wouldn’t be proportionally like that. Plus, it is the theory and maybe the practice would be totally different, but if we think about it, it could work.

Nowadays, every time more, you go to the cinema and (depending on the film) most of times not even the half of the room is full, that’s why lots of cinemas have to shut down. That’s why I think that it would be worth, because cinemas shutting down is in some way, culture getting lost. But well, maybe that’s what the government wants, people having less and less culture every time.