<blockquote>
  <p>lower production costs translate into lower sales costs</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Not as such, because you're looking at the total budget for making a movie <em>and all the copies of it needed to distribute and show it many, many times</em>. "The latest iPhone" cost a lot more in total to research, design and manufacture all the units, than my house did. But my house is a lot more expensive than an iPhone, because the iPhone has lots of buyers sharing the costs, and my house had only one. So there is no such direct relation between the total budget of bringing a new product to market, and the per-unit retail price of the product. All else being equal there would be, but all else is not equal.</p>

<p>The price you have to charge to cover costs depends on development costs <em>per unit sold</em>, not just the total budget, plus marginal costs of production. The marginal cost of providing a cinema seat is basically the same regardless of what film is showing (assuming the same kind of projection and sound). So that's a large chunk of the ticket price that not only has nothing to do with the budget on which the movie was made (which in any case as BKay says is a sunk cost), but doesn't even feed into the calculation in advance of whether it's worthwhile making a movie with a particular budget and particular expected audience size.</p>

<p>To plan for your movie to cover its development costs you have two options: charge more per viewer or find more viewers. Big-budget movies aggressively pursue the latter option and therefore (they hope) don't need to do the former. Meanwhile, movies with a smaller expected audience are constrained, by the fact that there's only so much they can charge per ticket, to lower budgets.</p>

<p>In fact, since prices don't vary much by by movie, we can very roughly (and with caution due to some of the "clever" accounting that goes on around movies) compare how much movies cost to make <em>per seat</em> by looking at the ratio between its budget and its box office. We see plenty of big-budget movies with decently high ratios (which therefore, to cover costs, could actually have charged <em>less</em> per seat than they actually did), and we see plenty of mid- and low-budget movies that make a loss and therefore achieved a ratio of less than one (and therefore, to cover costs, would have had to charge <em>more</em> than they actually did). I don't know what direction the correlation ends up being, if any, but it's clearly not the case that by all charging the same prices big-budget movies are uniformly under-charging and/or low-budget movies are uniformly over-charging. If that was the case then low-budget movies would be consistently more profitable (by this rough metric) than big-budget movies, and they aren't.</p>

<p>On the demand side, a viewer chooses what movie they want to watch partly on price and partly on the value to them of seeing the movie. BKay's answer goes into some detail of why it's undesirable for the movie-makers or the cinemas to do too much by way of varying prices. I hope I've explained why it is that they can actually achieve that without the difference in movie budgets getting in the way.</p>

<p>You ask in a comment:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>in a saturated, competitive market suppliers can compete by lowering
  their prices. A reduction in production cost means they can do so
  without reducing margins. Are you saying this intuition is incorrect more
  times than not?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Not "more times than not", just "not in the case of movies". Taking two arbitrary examples of science-fiction movies, there is no price point, not even 0, at which "Under the Skin" (budget 13 million USD, and which made a loss at the box office) could have achieved the same number of bums on seats as "The Force Awakens" (budget 200 million, box office north of 1.5 billion and still counting). The former is either a niche product, or an inferior product, or both, and if you could draw up the demand curves of the two movies they'd be drawing on completely different demand: these aren't "the same goods". Further, you would not find a strategy by which either of them gets anything much out of competing with each other on price. Not that they were even in the cinema at the same time, but even if they had been they are too distinct to use a simple model of a customer looking at both and picking the cheaper, despite the fact that individual customers do frequently find themselves in a cinema picking a movie. If there was a means by which "Under the Skin" could satisfy all that "Force Awakens" demand, then sure, it would seriously look into it, but they aren't fungible commodities.</p>

<p>On a loosely-related topic, note that cinemas in any case try to cater to a <em>lot</em> of price sensitivity among customers, by giving them the opportunity to drop a heap of cash on food and drink. Therefore (within a certain range) customers who might be tempted to see a cheaper movie than the average are in fact already in the door. They just aren't having popcorn.               </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T03:50:45.120Z
> Under the Skin | 
2013 film | 
6.3/10 IMDb | 
85% Rotten Tomatoes | 
78% Metacritic | 
An alien (Scarlett Johansson) disguised as a human woman lures unsuspecting Scotsmen into her van.
John Dvorak
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T08:05:40.433Z
A very interesting analysis in your closing remarks. I wonder if there is a correlation to movie production budget (or moviegoer expectations) and popcorn consumption.
JSideris
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T00:35:15.517Z
2016-03-29T00:50:33.513Z
2016-03-29T00:50:33.513Z
Steve Jessop
<p>The price of the tickets doesn't make much difference to the movie theater, because generally many contracts with the distributors are based on split of profits.
High budget movies generally takes home almost all profit on launch weeks and decrease week by week.
Low budget movies the split is more balanced and gives the theater more profit since the launch, but they don't fill all the seats.</p>

<p>In general, the theater will make money with big box movies only after a few weeks, and gives more profit than LB movies because the amount of tickets sold are much higher.</p>

<p>Some theaters earn more money from snacks sales than the movies.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T05:59:27.067Z
2016-01-15T05:59:27.067Z
Diego Mendes
<p><strong>Opportunity Cost of the Seats</strong></p>

<p>Once the movie is made the cost of production is sunk and irrelevant to the proper pricing of tickets. Only the marginal costs of serving an additional customer and the opportunity cost of showing a different film would enter into ticket pricing. Since cinemas should be setting the number of screens for each movie so that the opportunity costs of the seats are equated across films, this makes them want to charge the same for all films. In support of this idea, I offer that movies do vary in price by time of day. This is a rational response to the perishability of seats (once the movie starts an empty seat for that show is worthless) and time (of day) varying demand for film-going which varies the opportunity cost of the seats by time of day. The theater can't easily equate the opportunity cost across time the way it can across films. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.cgu.edu/include/at_the_movies.pdf">At the Movies: The Economics of Exhibition Contracts</a> (Filson, Switzer, and Besocke (2004)) provides the following explanation:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Practitioners provide several explanations for inflexible ticket
  prices. Exhibitors want to avoid menu costs and eliminate consumer
  uncertainty about what the movie will cost. Exhibitors do not increase
  prices of hits because they are engaged in repeat business with local
  consumers, and the potential loss of goodwill from increased prices
  outweighs the potential gain. Charging different prices for different
  movies at multiplexes necessitates employing monitors to ensure that
  consumers see the movies they pay for. Even offering mid-week
  discounts may lead to more time shifting than new demand. Not all
  analysts or practitioners agree that inflexible prices are optimal
  (see Orbach and Einav 2001), although it seems unlikely that such an
  easy-to-exploit profit opportunity would persist. Some practioners
  have experimented with non-uniform prices in  the U.S. in the recent
  past but inflexible prices remain the norm.</p>
</blockquote>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T19:52:41.933Z
Yes, prices are generally made based on value, not on cost. A good movie is better value and might command a higher price, though.
boot4life
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T21:22:58.787Z
@boot4life for a cinema, the scarce supply is seats, not sessions of a particular movie - if move A is better than B and can command a higher price, then they will simply show the better movie instead. In essence, the economic supply "rebalances" as you get more of movie A, less of movie B and the market prices equalize.
Peteris
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T00:40:41.807Z
Although it's true that the production cost is sunk once the cinema starts thinking about ticket prices, one could flip the question around and ask, "why do big-budget movies ever get made, given that the ticket prices don't increase to cover the costs of production and "therefore" you get paid just as much for supplying a cheap one as an expensive one?". I think that modified version of the question represents the same doubt on the part of the questioner, and of course the answer is that they aren't really interchangeable for various reasons :-)
Steve Jessop
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T03:46:27.443Z
@SteveJessop because high-budget movies tend to get more views than low-budget movies.
John Dvorak
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T16:36:10.403Z
2016-01-14T18:04:41.330Z
2016-01-14T18:04:41.330Z
BKay
<p>In most occurrences, lower production costs translate into lower sales costs. Obviously there are other factors that influence price, including perceived value (affected by advertising), monopolies, and so on.</p>

<p>However there are many companies that produce films that vary greatly in budget. For instance, the Blair Witch Project came out in 1999 with a budget of \$60,000. The same year, Star Wars Episode 1 came out with a budget of \$115 million. That's almost 2000 times more expensive. Yet the two films sat side by side in the box office charging the same amount of money per viewing.</p>

<p>Why don't the makers of super-low-budget films undercut the big budget films?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T16:35:57.487Z
I am pretty sure that it is not the film producers but the theathers that set the ticket prices. Despite this the question is still valid.
Giskard
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T17:57:33.307Z
@denesp I heard otherwise. My understanding is that most of the box office price goes to the film producers. Theaters make most of their money from concessions (unverified source).
JSideris
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T18:34:37.437Z
*"In most occurrences, lower production costs translate into lower sales costs"* - really? Production costs influence the *minimum* viable price at which a product can be profitable, and the viability of a competitor joining the market; but supply and demand drive the actual cost. When the production cost of `$150` fashionable sneakers drops from `$1.20` per unit to `$0.80` per unit, that doesn't stop the price going up...
user56reinstatemonica8
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T19:02:27.970Z
@Bizorke It is possible that 90% of the proceeds go to the studio yet it is still the theather that sets prices. You may be right, but it would surprise me because then different studios should try to undercut each other's price all the time.
Giskard
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T19:36:35.830Z
@user568458 But in a saturated, competitive market suppliers can compete by lowering their prices. A reduction in production cost means they can do so without reducing margins. Are you saying this intuition incorrect more times than not? I don't have the numbers - this is just my expectation.
JSideris
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T21:27:12.057Z
@Bizorke if you know that in saturated, competitive market something particular should happen, and you observe that it is actually not happening in practice, then you simply have evidence that the competition between movies (and movie studios) and ticket pricing is not like a saturated competitive commodity market. Just as many other markets, e.g. fashionable sneakers.
Peteris
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-14T21:56:59.930Z
Only for margins where that production cost is a factor. If your competitors sell chocolate bars for 50c, and you can cut the cost of making and distributing your chocolate bars from to 49c each to 41c each, that creates the option of selling at 45c, undercutting your competitors while keeping a narrow profit per unit. But the one-time cost to a film company of making a film is not a factor in the per-unit cost to a cinema of providing one seat in one theatre for one screening months later.
user56reinstatemonica8
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-15T07:33:52.870Z
The Planet Money podcast [covered a related question last summer](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/11/330680385/episode-552-blockbusters-bombs-and-the-price-of-a-ticket): why are the prices not set by demand, so why do blockbusters sell for the same price as a bomb? I think the answer was signaling: you don't want to be the cheap discount movie.
Jan Fabry
<microeconomics><industrial-organisation><price>
Why do low-budget films charge the same amount at the box office as super-high budget films?
JSideris
# Why do low-budget films charge the same amount at the box office as super-high budget films?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2016-01-14)

In most occurrences, lower production costs translate into lower sales costs. Obviously there are other factors that influence price, including perceived value (affected by advertising), monopolies, and so on.

However there are many companies that produce films that vary greatly in budget. For instance, the Blair Witch Project came out in 1999 with a budget of \$60,000. The same year, Star Wars Episode 1 came out with a budget of \$115 million. That's almost 2000 times more expensive. Yet the two films sat side by side in the box office charging the same amount of money per viewing.

Why don't the makers of super-low-budget films undercut the big budget films?

**Tags:** microeconomics, industrial-organisation, price

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I am pretty sure that it is not the film producers but the theathers that set the ticket prices. Despite this the question is still valid.  
> **username_0**: @denesp I heard otherwise. My understanding is that most of the box office price goes to the film producers. Theaters make most of their money from concessions (unverified source).  
> **username_2**: *"In most occurrences, lower production costs translate into lower sales costs"* - really? Production costs influence the *minimum* viable price at which a product can be profitable, and the viability of a competitor joining the market; but supply and demand drive the actual cost. When the production cost of `$150` fashionable sneakers drops from `$1.20` per unit to `$0.80` per unit, that doesn't stop the price going up...  
> **username_1**: @Bizorke It is possible that 90% of the proceeds go to the studio yet it is still the theather that sets prices. You may be right, but it would surprise me because then different studios should try to undercut each other's price all the time.  
> **username_0**: @user568458 But in a saturated, competitive market suppliers can compete by lowering their prices. A reduction in production cost means they can do so without reducing margins. Are you saying this intuition incorrect more times than not? I don't have the numbers - this is just my expectation.  
> **username_3**: @Bizorke if you know that in saturated, competitive market something particular should happen, and you observe that it is actually not happening in practice, then you simply have evidence that the competition between movies (and movie studios) and ticket pricing is not like a saturated competitive commodity market. Just as many other markets, e.g. fashionable sneakers.  
> **username_2**: Only for margins where that production cost is a factor. If your competitors sell chocolate bars for 50c, and you can cut the cost of making and distributing your chocolate bars from to 49c each to 41c each, that creates the option of selling at 45c, undercutting your competitors while keeping a narrow profit per unit. But the one-time cost to a film company of making a film is not a factor in the per-unit cost to a cinema of providing one seat in one theatre for one screening months later.  
> **username_4**: The Planet Money podcast [covered a related question last summer](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/11/330680385/episode-552-blockbusters-bombs-and-the-price-of-a-ticket): why are the prices not set by demand, so why do blockbusters sell for the same price as a bomb? I think the answer was signaling: you don't want to be the cheap discount movie.  

---

## 3 answers

### Answer by username_8 on 2016-01-14. Score: 17 | Accepted answer

**Opportunity Cost of the Seats**

Once the movie is made the cost of production is sunk and irrelevant to the proper pricing of tickets. Only the marginal costs of serving an additional customer and the opportunity cost of showing a different film would enter into ticket pricing. Since cinemas should be setting the number of screens for each movie so that the opportunity costs of the seats are equated across films, this makes them want to charge the same for all films. In support of this idea, I offer that movies do vary in price by time of day. This is a rational response to the perishability of seats (once the movie starts an empty seat for that show is worthless) and time (of day) varying demand for film-going which varies the opportunity cost of the seats by time of day. The theater can't easily equate the opportunity cost across time the way it can across films.

[At the Movies: The Economics of Exhibition Contracts](http://www.cgu.edu/include/at_the_movies.pdf) (Filson, Switzer, and Besocke (2004)) provides the following explanation:

> Practitioners provide several explanations for inflexible ticket
> prices. Exhibitors want to avoid menu costs and eliminate consumer
> uncertainty about what the movie will cost. Exhibitors do not increase
> prices of hits because they are engaged in repeat business with local
> consumers, and the potential loss of goodwill from increased prices
> outweighs the potential gain. Charging different prices for different
> movies at multiplexes necessitates employing monitors to ensure that
> consumers see the movies they pay for. Even offering mid-week
> discounts may lead to more time shifting than new demand. Not all
> analysts or practitioners agree that inflexible prices are optimal
> (see Orbach and Einav 2001), although it seems unlikely that such an
> easy-to-exploit profit opportunity would persist. Some practioners
> have experimented with non-uniform prices in the U.S. in the recent
> past but inflexible prices remain the norm.

> **Comments:**
> **username_9**: Yes, prices are generally made based on value, not on cost. A good movie is better value and might command a higher price, though.  
> **username_3**: @username_9 for a cinema, the scarce supply is seats, not sessions of a particular movie - if move A is better than B and can command a higher price, then they will simply show the better movie instead. In essence, the economic supply "rebalances" as you get more of movie A, less of movie B and the market prices equalize.  
> **username_5**: Although it's true that the production cost is sunk once the cinema starts thinking about ticket prices, one could flip the question around and ask, "why do big-budget movies ever get made, given that the ticket prices don't increase to cover the costs of production and "therefore" you get paid just as much for supplying a cheap one as an expensive one?". I think that modified version of the question represents the same doubt on the part of the questioner, and of course the answer is that they aren't really interchangeable for various reasons :-)  
> **username_6**: @username_5 because high-budget movies tend to get more views than low-budget movies.  

---

### Answer by username_5 on 2016-01-15. Score: 3

> lower production costs translate into lower sales costs

Not as such, because you're looking at the total budget for making a movie *and all the copies of it needed to distribute and show it many, many times*. "The latest iPhone" cost a lot more in total to research, design and manufacture all the units, than my house did. But my house is a lot more expensive than an iPhone, because the iPhone has lots of buyers sharing the costs, and my house had only one. So there is no such direct relation between the total budget of bringing a new product to market, and the per-unit retail price of the product. All else being equal there would be, but all else is not equal.

The price you have to charge to cover costs depends on development costs *per unit sold*, not just the total budget, plus marginal costs of production. The marginal cost of providing a cinema seat is basically the same regardless of what film is showing (assuming the same kind of projection and sound). So that's a large chunk of the ticket price that not only has nothing to do with the budget on which the movie was made (which in any case as username_8 says is a sunk cost), but doesn't even feed into the calculation in advance of whether it's worthwhile making a movie with a particular budget and particular expected audience size.

To plan for your movie to cover its development costs you have two options: charge more per viewer or find more viewers. Big-budget movies aggressively pursue the latter option and therefore (they hope) don't need to do the former. Meanwhile, movies with a smaller expected audience are constrained, by the fact that there's only so much they can charge per ticket, to lower budgets.

In fact, since prices don't vary much by by movie, we can very roughly (and with caution due to some of the "clever" accounting that goes on around movies) compare how much movies cost to make *per seat* by looking at the ratio between its budget and its box office. We see plenty of big-budget movies with decently high ratios (which therefore, to cover costs, could actually have charged *less* per seat than they actually did), and we see plenty of mid- and low-budget movies that make a loss and therefore achieved a ratio of less than one (and therefore, to cover costs, would have had to charge *more* than they actually did). I don't know what direction the correlation ends up being, if any, but it's clearly not the case that by all charging the same prices big-budget movies are uniformly under-charging and/or low-budget movies are uniformly over-charging. If that was the case then low-budget movies would be consistently more profitable (by this rough metric) than big-budget movies, and they aren't.

On the demand side, a viewer chooses what movie they want to watch partly on price and partly on the value to them of seeing the movie. username_8's answer goes into some detail of why it's undesirable for the movie-makers or the cinemas to do too much by way of varying prices. I hope I've explained why it is that they can actually achieve that without the difference in movie budgets getting in the way.

You ask in a comment:

> in a saturated, competitive market suppliers can compete by lowering
> their prices. A reduction in production cost means they can do so
> without reducing margins. Are you saying this intuition is incorrect more
> times than not?

Not "more times than not", just "not in the case of movies". Taking two arbitrary examples of science-fiction movies, there is no price point, not even 0, at which "Under the Skin" (budget 13 million USD, and which made a loss at the box office) could have achieved the same number of bums on seats as "The Force Awakens" (budget 200 million, box office north of 1.5 billion and still counting). The former is either a niche product, or an inferior product, or both, and if you could draw up the demand curves of the two movies they'd be drawing on completely different demand: these aren't "the same goods". Further, you would not find a strategy by which either of them gets anything much out of competing with each other on price. Not that they were even in the cinema at the same time, but even if they had been they are too distinct to use a simple model of a customer looking at both and picking the cheaper, despite the fact that individual customers do frequently find themselves in a cinema picking a movie. If there was a means by which "Under the Skin" could satisfy all that "Force Awakens" demand, then sure, it would seriously look into it, but they aren't fungible commodities.

On a loosely-related topic, note that cinemas in any case try to cater to a *lot* of price sensitivity among customers, by giving them the opportunity to drop a heap of cash on food and drink. Therefore (within a certain range) customers who might be tempted to see a cheaper movie than the average are in fact already in the door. They just aren't having popcorn.

> **Comments:**
> **username_6**: > Under the Skin |  2013 film |  6.3/10 IMDb |  85% Rotten Tomatoes |  78% Metacritic |  An alien (Scarlett Johansson) disguised as a human woman lures unsuspecting Scotsmen into her van.  
> **username_0**: A very interesting analysis in your closing remarks. I wonder if there is a correlation to movie production budget (or moviegoer expectations) and popcorn consumption.  

---

### Answer by username_7 on 2016-01-15. Score: 0

The price of the tickets doesn't make much difference to the movie theater, because generally many contracts with the distributors are based on split of profits.
High budget movies generally takes home almost all profit on launch weeks and decrease week by week.
Low budget movies the split is more balanced and gives the theater more profit since the launch, but they don't fill all the seats.

In general, the theater will make money with big box movies only after a few weeks, and gives more profit than LB movies because the amount of tickets sold are much higher.

Some theaters earn more money from snacks sales than the movies.


---

