[kshcho]

So basically, as a customer, you'd have to assume you're going to 4-7 movies per month to break even on this (depending on how much movies cost in your area - $6.50 matinees or $13+ a ticket in Manhattan).

A bunch of mid-2000s polls suggest the average American goes to 4-6 movies per YEAR - probably has come down a bit given structural trends. Not sure what the distribution looks like, but I'd guess it's a pretty thin tail of people who go more than 4-6 times per month.

So either they're hoping people think they go a lot more often than they really do, or are giving a great deal to a small portion of the population.

Pricing seems quite a bit off for this to be attractive to 95% of the populace (though given theaters need to pay a cut for each body that comes in to the distributor, they probably wanted to be on the conservative side)... maybe should have done something like $25-30/month, and hope the users buy enough concessions to make up the difference. Or do the $50, but throw in a free massive bucket of popcorn for every trip, which costs virtually nothing to the theater anyway (and presumably, the customer's usually going to want to buy a drink, which is basically 95% profit).