CinemaCon 2025 - Sony
Per usual, Tom Rothman kicked off the Vegas-based event, this time with a comparatively fat-free and low-key presentation that offered a few clues about this year's broader narratives.
Tom Rothman didn’t precisely say “flexible ticket pricing,” but that certainly seemed to be the implication when he opened his remarks by discussing what I and others like to call “Cheap Ticket Tuesday.” Yes, Tuesday grosses go up even though the ticket prices are uniformly less expensive. Heck, the long legs for films like Aladdin in the summer of 2019 and Everything Everywhere All At Once in early 2022 offered evidence that fans were taking advantage of the discount day to turn repeat viewership into a kind of weekly activity. Meanwhile, relative successes amid the “summer of MoviePass” (essentially July 2017 through July 2018) and the semi-regular “National Cinema Day” events add fuel to the fire that, even if it’s primarily psychological, removing the ticket price from the equation causes consumers to become more casual and/or adventurous about their theatrical moviegoing. No way Three Identical Strangers cracks $12 million in 2018 without MoviePass.
He also stressed the value and importance of theatrical windows, noting an increasing number of consumers who presume that theatrical films will be on PVOD within a month, with SVOD presumed to follow soon. Whether that impacts the fortunes of successful releases, and five years after Trolls: World Tour, there’s little evidence of such; his comments will likely be repeated by studios more committed to longer theatrical windows and those speaking specifically for the theater chains. However, conversations I’ve had on otherwise unrelated matters have also dipped into flexible ticket pricing, something that, to be fair, James Cameron was discussing back in the early 1990s while promoting True Lies. Whether coincidental conversation or concurrent talking points, I might recklessly speculate or theorize that a kind of “grand bargain” can be arranged between theaters and studios, essentially trading flex pricing for studios in exchange for longer and more industry-wide consistent exclusivity windows for theaters.