In the gouging spirit of surge pricing and airline basic economy, AMC Theatres this week announced its new seating strategy.
It’s called “Sightline at AMC.” It means you pay a buck or two more for “preferred sightline” seats, typically in the middle of its auditoriums.
“While every seat at AMC delivers an amazing moviegoing experience,” said Eliot Hamlisch, chief marketing officer of the nation’s largest surviving theater chain, the new policy means you’re paying more for good seats and, yes, true, slightly discounted rates for the “value sightline” inventory in the front row. The rest, same price. But not in the middle of the theater. Those are premium now.
Reasonable moviegoers can disagree on this development, I suppose. But I’m not interested in hearing from reasonable moviegoers on this point. It’s a bush-league pickpocket move, and if you’ll pardon the hyperbole, it sounds to me like the latest tiny nail getting tap-tap-tapped into the coffin currently under construction for an entire era of filmgoing.
Whatever; I’ll get over it. And that’s what AMC is hoping. That we’ll get over it, and pay the wee upcharge for the privilege of what used to come without one. I’ve flown basic economy a few times, and I resent that, too. Yet I still do it because as Gene Kelly says in “An American in Paris,” when you don’t have much money “it takes on a curious significance.”
So why the blowback (and there’s been a lot) about AMC’s tiered pricing structure, implemented by a struggling business trying, at the moment to entice audiences back inside a multiplex?
This bugs me, I think, because AMC has not done particularly well refurbishing their longtime or newly acquired theaters in the midst of the pandemic and the film industry’s streaming priorities.
On Facebook, you can find crestfallen accounts of how the AMC-acquired Evanston Century theater has managed to deglamorize the actual, physical and atmospheric niceties of the place. Same with NewCity 14 on Clybourn, now an AMC property, and now a little less appealing than it was under ArcLight management. (A quick search for movie tickets at the two dozen or so AMC Theatres in the Chicago area suggests the new Sightline prices aren’t yet in effect.)
Maybe it’s unfair to grouse about this stuff when AMC — no doubt assessing how other chains, notably Regal, have contracted in bankruptcy — is fighting for popcorn money and eyeballs like everybody else. But this is basic economy stuff. It makes you wonder: If business were better right now, would AMC narrow its seats and zero out the legroom, too?
As a critic and a civilian, my heart breaks by increments at how the mainstream film exhibition business is undermining itself all the way to the bank(ruptcy). There’s a reason a place like the Music Box Theatre still thrives. It hasn’t devalued or upcharged or shortchanged the actual customer experience, and their seats aren’t even comfortable, and the parking isn’t easy, and they still draw several hundred people to all kinds of movies.
Improbable as it sounds, Chicago is seeing a striking amount of moviegoing activity. Alamo Drafthouse just opened its first Chicago venue, in Wrigleyville, and if you want high-end, dine-in filmgoing, with great big screens in cozy venues, it’s a contender. It’s not a cheapjack affair.
In Hyde Park, the Harper Theatre has a new long-term leaseholder: ACX Cinemas, family-owned, based in Omaha, reopening for business this spring. From the looks of the major renovations underway right now, they’re spending money to make money.
Easy for me to say, but more businesses should try that sometime.
AMC avoided disaster through the weirdest pennystock save-the-theaters campaign imaginable. It was a joke that turned into economic salvation. How long-term that salvation will be, ultimately, is up to the company and its relationship to you, the ticketbuyer.
The Sightline policy, already in place in some of its theaters and spreading throughout the chain this year, lies somewhere on the spectrum between “dubious” and “lying.” If every seat at AMC actually delivered an amazing customer experience, would we be getting dinged for a seat in row 6 on the aisle?
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(Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.)
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