You can store all your music on your phone or laptop, and yet vinyl records are hip. As Gillette and Schick are adding blades and fins and strips to their razors, 20-somethings are opting for old-school “safety” razors or even straight razors. Typewriters, skateboards, fixed-gear bikes, and all sorts of old tech have become fads in recent years.
The next low-tech fad may just be going to the movies. There are subtle signs that the long-term decline is reversing.
The average movie ticket costs upwards of $9, and so it’s no wonder that movie theaters have gone through a 24-year slump.
The latest effort to reverse this was a very tech-bubble idea called MoviePass. It was an audacious subscription service. Users paid $14.95 a month, and that allowed them to get one movie ticket a day. How did $14.95 pay for up to 30 movie tickets? It didn’t.
MoviePass just had to pay the theaters for all those tickets, while hoping to recoup costs by selling user data. Unsurprisingly, that model proved untenable. (One financier is offering to buy the company, which means moviegoers might benefit from its $14.95/month, movie per day deal if MoviePass can maintain it.)
MoviePass’ failure, however, was a reverberation of a trend most didn’t predict: The kids actually do like going to movies.
With the explosion of streaming services, where a monthly subscription can cost the same price as a single movie ticket, there were worries that theaters were headed the direction of roller rinks (we’ll have to check to see if those are back in style).
But Generation Z might be turning that around. A full 43% report seeing a movie in the last month, compared to 34% of Gen Xers. From IT to Eighth Grade, movies about young people are raking in cash at the box office.
Last year, movie ticket revenue rose 8%.
Going to the movie theater could be the latest “retro” trend, like wearing bulky headphones or buying a record player. Thanks to the younger generation, which may be growing tired of its increasing disconnection, more viewers might be flocking to the theaters to watch films together.
