Cost of Entertainment

Ack, it’s been way too long since my last post. So this one’s probably going to be short but it’s an interesting idea, the cost of entertainment and what we are willing to pay. With the cost of movie tickets slowly rising, I’ve started to limit the number of movies I go to. Tickets are just about $10 non matinee where I live and I’ve heard they’re up to about $20 in big cities like LA and NYC. So a dinner and movie, for two would run 40 for the movie, and as little as $10 if you went to fast food. Assuming your date would let you get away with that, so about $50, for a cheap date. That’s getting a bit nuts, and makes me glad I don’t live in a big city.

I am willing to pay $10 for about 2 hours of entertainment. This has kind of become my base line. Video games at $40-$60 are a bargain when you consider I’ll likely get 60 to 100 hours from a game, if not more and a subscription game like World of Warcraft isn’t a bad investment at $14 a month for the nearly unlimited amount of entertainment one could get if that was all you did in your free time. But that’s measuring quantity of entertainment by the dollar. What about quality of entertainment. Going to a concert, or a play, will get you about the same length of entertainment as a movie, but will hopefully be better entertainment. Cheap tickets to see U2 in concert are $64. Assuming about an hour and a half to two hour show, that’s over three times the cost of a movie in LA and six times as much as one at my local theater. But there is an experience to be had there that you can’t get from listening to CD’s. Cheap tickets to see Wicked in San Francisco are $142, over twice the cost of seeing U2. You pay more for these kinds of entertainment because they are “Art”. You are paying for the talent of the performers and for the ability to see it live.

Can we expect to see the cost of movies continue to climb? I think so, will it get as high as a concert? Perhaps. Considering the ballooning cost of making movies in the US, I could see ticket costs continuing to rise. The trick is that movies were supposed to be a cheap form of mass entertainment. The first movies were in machines called Nickelodeon’s. They were short, a few min at best, videos that you hand cranked and they cost 5 cents, thus how they got their name. In 1932 the first real theater charged 3 cents per person. By 1967 the average ticket price was up to $1.22, 1977 it was $2.23, only a dollar more in 10 years, where as by 1987 it was up to $3.91, $1.72 more. In 2000, the price was an average of $5.39 and has risen to an average of $7.50 as of 2009. For a further break down go here. The average cost includes all ticket sales together, whether they be matinee, children’s, discount or normal.

I don’t know what prices are going to do in the future, but if they continue to rise at the rate they are, I’m not sure how much longer I will be willing to see a movie. For comparison the UN World Food Programme, estimates it costs about 25 cents a day to feed a child, or 50 dollars a year. That means if I see 5 fewer movies a year I could feed a child for the same amount of time. So then, what is the value of our entertainment?