Box office massacre: how Hollywood flopped this summer Read more

For Hollywood, summer has been a disaster movie. US ticket sales are the lowest in decades, the landscape is strewn with fatigued franchises and broken tentpoles, and most studios don’t have two blockbusters to rub together. Which is unfortunate because blockbusters are now the only game in town. Studios have steadily been painting themselves into a corner by releasing fewer, more expensive movies at the expense of mid-range drama, which has pretty much defected to television.

Concurrent with this trend has been a steady rise in ticket prices. Effects movies demand state-of-the-art projection and sound, 3D, Imax, Dolby Atmos, all of which come at a premium. A night at the cinema is now a big investment, especially in the UK, which has some of the highest prices in the world. (The UK average in 2016 was £7.41, but in a decent London cinema you’re looking at over £20). One problem is that the ticket price is the same whatever the movie. Punters want to get their money’s worth, so you can hardly blame them for choosing the big-budget popcorn splurge on Screen 1 over the thoughtful indie on Screen 12. It’s not a level playing field; more like a Premier League football team competing against the local minnows.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pyramid scheme ... The Mummy’s Tom Cruise shields co-star Annabelle Wallis from the film’s less-than-box-office takings. Photograph: Universal/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

So here’s a suggestion: a two-tier cinema system. Your blockbusters in one league, and a separate circuit for lower-budget movies, with much cheaper tickets. For a long time, this was how movies operated. The term “B-movie” now applies to anything vaguely low-budget and/or trashy, but from about the 1930s to the 1960s, B-movies were that second tier: cheaper, shorter films that often played before the “A” feature. A-movies were the prestige star vehicles; B-movies were often lowbrow, formulaic genre fare: horrors, sci-fi, action movies, often part of a series – in other words, the stuff of modern-day blockbusters.

Now it’s serious dramas that are the B-movies, pushed to the margins along with what we used to call “arthouse” movies: challenging, non-mainstream, maybe foreign movies. These are cinema’s endangered species. So why not put them all in a separate type of cinema and charge half the price? It would be a cheaper night out for punters and a proving ground for new talent. Many directors and actors cut their teeth in B-movies, from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, Val Lewton to Sam Fuller, not forgetting Roger Corman’s B-movie production line, which pumped new blood into Hollywood the last time it needed a transfusion (Jack Nicholson, Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, even James Cameron). It could do it again.