Cinemas out of reach

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-25 16:04

The price of movie tickets should be lowered to suit people's incomes, says an article in People's Daily. The following is an excerpt:

China's film industry has progressed significantly in recent years - new stars have been added to the constellation of celebrities and many excellent films have been made. So it is surprising that audience sizes are down an estimated 90 percent compared with the 1990s. Cinemas have been struggling to attract customers, which created a bottleneck for the growth of China's film industry.

Is it that people have found other ways to entertain themselves? Not likely. On Tuesdays, when cinemas cut ticket prizes in half, the box offices are swarmed with people, queues are long and few seats are empty. This proves that people have not lost their interest in film - they simply cannot afford to pay for tickets.

In Guangzhou, for example, tickets for films celebrating the coming of the New Year cost as much as 100 yuan ($14) per ticket, while the cheapest seats are still 60 yuan. This is about a tenth of the monthly salary of some urban workers. The country's per capita GDP is only one twentieth of that of the United States, but it costs about the same to go to the cinema. That means it costs us 20 times more to go the cinema than people in the US, making China's the most expensive cinemas in the world.

Film in essence is a collective form of recreation, but common people can no longer afford it. Migrants and laid-off workers are unable to buy tickets with their meager wages.

A reasonable price would be about one one-hundredth of the average monthly wage of both rural and urban residents. Lower prices would attract more people, so it would not harm box office receipts. As statistics have shown, the box office takings on Tuesday are equal to those on weekends.

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