But it's something of a mystery to Orbach and Einav that studios and theaters, so notoriously canny about finding profits, never experiment with higher prices to capture more money from inevitable blockbusters -- or with lower prices to fill up empty seats.

To make successful movies more expensive, you have to know what movies are going to be successful. That's not as hard as it sounds.

The Hollywood cliche is that "nobody knows anything" when it comes to how a movie will perform at the box office. But there are some basic rules of thumb. More expensive movies have bigger audiences. There is a high "correlation coefficient" between production costs and gross revenues. Sequels outperform non-sequels. The seven best-performing movies of 2011 were second, fifth or eight in a franchise. Christmastime outsells Eastertime ... and every other time, as the graph of weekly attendance below shows. Furthermore, it's practically a rule of law that big opening weekends predict overall success and that movie revenues fall after the first week.



One-price-tickets is a kind of return to the earliest days of (barely) moving pictures, when everybody would put a penny in a peep show machine. But the first instances of what film archeologists would actually call "movies" around 1910 featured different prices for different films. Movies were priced according to their length, stars, and popularity. For three decades until the 1940s, one theater would have the rights to each movie within a certain zone, and movies received grades (A, B, or C) that corresponded with ticket prices at those theaters. If the rules of the 1920s ruled today, Mission Impossible might be $15 and Young Adult might be $7. What changed?

Everything. For starters, the famous Paramount anti-trust case broke up monopolies between producers and distributors. Multiplexes replaced single-serving theaters. A recession after World War II coincided with the popularity of television to gut studio revenue, forcing them to rely on fewer, more expensive movies.

Over time, the system moved toward one price for all films. As Steven Pearlstein explains:



If you have any doubt that the studios have the power to dictate uniform retail prices, consider what happened with the introduction of "The Godfather" in 1972. Up to that point, the tradition was that theaters could charge a premium for tickets to the handful of "event" movies that came out every year -- in the modern context, the "Harry Potter" and "Spider-Man" movies. But when "The Godfather" was released in 1972, suddenly every movie theater in the country eliminated its event-movie pricing. That's the kind of "coincidence" Don Vito Corleone would have been proud of.

Forty years later, uniform pricing is uniform practice for movie theaters. And with the onslaught from online streaming, legal downloads, and DVDs, studios and theaters are nervous as heck about pissing off what die-hards they have left by moving prices based on demand. (Although, you could argue that charging more for a 3-D movie is an interesting exception.)