The big screen got bigger
Premium formats are a small share of screens and a large share of opening weekend. The upgrade, not the ticket, is what theatres now sell.
Geoffrey Moffett via UnsplashA cinema ticket used to be one product at one price. It is now a base product and an upgrade, and the upgrade is where the economics of the modern box office actually sit.
The disproportion is the striking part. Reporting on the format's performance describes premium large-format screens taking a share of a tentpole's gross far out of proportion to their number, with one release drawing more than a quarter of its worldwide total from a single format.
The mechanism is scarcity applied to a schedule. There are few such rooms, they are booked solid on an opening weekend, and the ticket costs more, so a small number of seats produces an outsized share of a film's first-week revenue.
That has changed what a distributor negotiates for. Securing premium screens for an opening is now a term in the conversation rather than an afterthought, and a film that cannot get them opens differently from one that can.
It has also changed what gets made. A film shot for the format is a different object: composed for the frame, mixed for the room, and marketed on the promise that seeing it anywhere else is seeing less of it.
For exhibitors the appeal is straightforward. The upgrade carries a higher price against a fixed cost per screening, and the customer buying it is the one who came for the experience rather than the convenience.
The strategic risk is a familiar one. If the premium room becomes the only version worth attending, the ordinary auditorium becomes the thing people decline to pay for, and most of a multiplex is ordinary auditoriums.
That is the tension underneath the enthusiasm. The format is being used to argue that cinema offers something a home cannot, and the argument works best in a small number of rooms most audiences do not have access to.
Filmmakers have taken the point in both directions. Some are composing for the largest available frame, and others note that a format available in a few hundred locations is a poor foundation for an art form that needs to reach further.
What is not in dispute is where the money is. A shrinking number of films carries the theatrical calendar, those films open on premium screens, and the upgrade is now the product rather than a garnish on it.