Phil Gyford

DeAnna Burghart said: “First of all, movie theatres are a red herring. Don’t include them in the calculation. They make almost 0 money off of those tickets; they make money off of concessions.”

I’d love to see the source for this claim. I did a quick bit of Google-research last year and found it was more like: “[Screen Digest] estimate that concessions accounted for 20% of the gross revenues of U.S. exhibitors in the year 2000. They further estimate that those sales accounted for approximately 40% of profits.” And AMC’s ticket sales accounted for 67% of revenues in 2001, compared to 28% from concessions.

The sources I found are linked to from this comment: http://www.kottke.org/05/07/economics-movies-popcorn#18828