Tight A%# Tuesday Gets a Little Tighter!!

SMH Tuesday 2/8/05
Cinemas slash ticket prices to revive sales
By Garry Maddox, Film ReporterAugust 2, 2005

In a move to revive flagging box office sales, one of the major cinema chains is almost halving its top ticket price to $8.50 this week.
Hoyts announced yesterday that tickets for "any movie, any session, all day long" would be discounted savagely from Thursday to Sunday after yet another flat weekend for takings.
The other major chain in NSW, Greater Union, is also turning back the clock with tickets cut to $5 on Tuesdays and $10 for online bookings this month.
These deals represent heavy discounting from the top ticket price of $15.50.
Despite rallying with respectable business for War of the Worlds, the slump that had takings down by 14 per cent in the first half of the year has continued. Last weekend's takings for the top 20 films was just $7.45 million, compared with $9.7 million for the same period last year, after the poorly reviewed action film The Island took a disappointing $1.8 million.
Even some of the relative successes in recent months - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which has taken $35 million, and Batman Begins, which has taken $15.2 million - were well down on industry expectations. Other films, including House of Wax, have been major disappointments.

In North America, which had a 19-week box office slump, many highly touted releases have crashed at the box office.
The latest is the action movie Stealth, which was shot in Sydney for more than $US100 million. It took just $US13.5 million ($17.8 million) at the American box office last weekend.
While distributors recognise that takings have been flat, they were playing down the significance of the discounting by the cinema chains yesterday.
"It's too early to call it a crisis," said Jon Anderson, the marketing manager for the distributor United International Pictures. "There's an expectation that business will turn around by the end of the year."
The head of the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia, Joel Pearlman, has blamed the absence of a Lord of the Rings film to start the year, the disappointing quality of some Hollywood releases and the lack of a surprise hit like The Passion of the Christ for the downturn.
The art-houses have also been suffering with owner Chris Kiely announcing that he will close the struggling Valhalla cinema in Glebe tomorrow night.
He was one of two partners who handed back another ailing art-house cinema, the Chauvel in Paddington, to the Australian Film Institute in May.
He blamed the trend to watching films at home on DVD and the poor quality of recent releases for the decision to put the building up for auction later this month.
The closure was "accepting the inevitable", he said. "There's a real lack of quality art-house films out there. There has been for quite some time. There has really been only two sub-titled films with any real success this year."




Hail to Chris and the long tradition upheld at the Valhalla!!