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Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Iron Crowned posted:

Dollar theaters were nice for an afternoon of cheap entertainment in my early-mid 20's. Plus they had the cult movie nights on weekends, I saw Star Trek 2 on one of those. I stopped going a lot when they closed the one down the street near me, and I had to go across town to the other one.

Then again this was right at the time when Netflix was starting their streaming service.

One of my friends and I went to one of those the summer we graduated high school and showed up right as it opened. We slapped twenty bucks down on the counter and told them we’d be there the whole day and by god we did it. It ruled, I still maintain seeing Silent Hill in a run down dollar theater is the way to do it.

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Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Ugly In The Morning posted:

One of my friends and I went to one of those the summer we graduated high school and showed up right as it opened. We slapped twenty bucks down on the counter and told them we’d be there the whole day and by god we did it. It ruled, I still maintain seeing Silent Hill in a run down dollar theater is the way to do it.

It definitely helped my enjoyment of Land of the Dead.

Where I was living the dollar theater was the only place I could see some movies, because we had exactly one "chain" in Wichita, Warren theaters, who owned all three good theaters and both dollar theaters, so there were occasional first runs there.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
I miss cheap theaters that are mostly empty*. Cheapest I ever saw was one in the 1990's that cost a quarter. Everything was crap including the movie, but it only cost a quarter.

Stadium seating screwed over a lot of those old cheap theaters. Everyone wanted the raised seats even for dollar films.


* NOT empty because of a pandemic, loving monkey's paw.

butt dickus
Jul 7, 2007

top ten juiced up coaches
and the top ten juiced up players

Iron Crowned posted:

Where I was living the dollar theater was the only place I could see some movies, because we had exactly one "chain" in Wichita, Warren theaters, who owned all three good theaters and both dollar theaters, so there were occasional first runs there.
the palace ruled, especially after they got the hand-me-down (but still nice) seats from the warren. you could get two tickets, a giant popcorn and soda for under $20. you also needed to add "real" butter for fifty cents so they hit you with that orange stuff from those pumps on the counter. i will never go to that god drat cracker barrel

AngryRobotsInc
Aug 2, 2011

We have a fairly decent cheap movie theater here where I live. The most expensive tickets are $3 for evening showings. They definitely do make their money off concessions, but I've taken myself and my son, and bought us both snacks, and it came out to about the cost of just tickets at the only other theater in the city (a Regal). They show a mix of "Has been out in the big theaters for like a month" stuff, and older films. They occasionally do theme runs of things, especially during the summer. Like one time they did a month of Ghibli films, one summer a run of classics (I can only remember Wizard of Oz, but they were all about that age), the entire series of Harry Potter films each running for a week, etc.

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

8one6 posted:

At this point there are three kinds of movie theaters in the US (and by the US I mean in my personal experience, so a medium sized city in the middle of the country):

1) lovely dollar theaters that get movies two weeks after they show up on Netflix. The snacks generally suck. The seats generally suck, the theaters screens are on the smaller size because they used to be...

2) older theaters that aren't terrible, but the seats are too small and are laid out more level with each other so you might have visibility issues, often with smaller screens. The available snacks are the 'too many servings for one person' candy bags, popcorn that's been out for a few hours, nachos with stale chips, and giant sodas that cost as much as the ticket. Most of these are (or were in the before times) are being converted into...

3) really nice theaters with large, stadium seating (often times with enough room in the rows that the seats can fully recline) and modern sound systems, the same 'too much' candy selection, roller grill stuff like hotdogs or maybe burgers, decent popcorn, decent nachos, and the same enormous KFC bucket-sized sodas that cost too much.

Alamo was 3 but it also offered at seat dining.

Yeah, this is fairly accurate for heavily popular South Florida as well. To go into more detail for the UK goon who asked, a lot of them can be split up based on their age.

Basically, there are almost zero single-screen theaters left, almost everything is a multiplex of varying size. The oldest theaters tended to have 3 or 4 screens and would be tucked into all sorts of little shopping centers, sometimes next to large malls or retail centers, but you'll also find these tucked into random corner plazas next to supermarkets and whatnot. The seats in these tend to be small, the floor being almost flat or only slightly elevated toward the back. The screens will be smaller, and the rooms were narrow rectangles. Your snack options were basically just typical popcorn, soda, and basic boxes of candy. Most of these were built by the late 1970's, might have gotten some renovations over the years, but most of them disappeared within the last 15 years as larger, more modern venues were built in better locations with better concessions and seating and so on. There used to be three or four of these within 5 miles of me, and the last of them closed about 8 years ago. Note that these were not cheaper theaters, they were still showing first run movies the same as any other location and they typically had average pricing most of the time. They simply were the oldest and closest theaters to people for a while. I definitely had a soft spot for a few of them, as they were the 'local' place we went to see movies for years, but it's not a surprise most of them went away when they did.

Next you'd get the mid-sized multiplex, which might have 6 to 10 screens, and were usually built down here around the early-to-mid 1980's. The screens here were slightly larger, and the seating areas were much wider to hold about double the people of the smaller places, but still not have much elevation to the seating, so you'd still potentially be hosed if a tall person sat in front of you. Back in the day, these might have had slightly more food options than the smaller places, also offering nachos, hot dogs, pretzels, or whatnot, basically, more than just popcorn and candy. These types of theaters basically have had a few different fates. Starting about 20 years ago, as still newer and larger multiplexes opened (More on these in a moment), about half of them in the area would close and be torn down. Those that remained have generally gone in two directions. The ones that always tried to have first run movies have largely converted to have more food and seating options. They added things like custom full size pizza and food you normally wouldn't think of for a movie theater (Really, restaurant fare), craft beers and other alcohol, as well as stuff like reclining seats and more amenities than normal. Those that didn't try to do first run movies have largely remained as low cost options, although since the time a movie remains in theaters has gone down considerably over the last few decades, the difference between them and others is a lot less than it used to be. There's a number of them down here, usually located in close proximity to senior communities, and at least before COVID, they largely made do by having discounts a lot (Seniors once or twice a week, students another day, family specials, dollar days, and so on).

After that you'd get the massive, stadium seating megaplexes with 20 or more screens. These would have much larger screens, massive auditoriums with seating for several hundred people. These started popping up in the mid-1990s, usually connected to or in very close proximity to large outlet malls. Aside from their size, these tended to be the first theaters to make the seating area less flat than the older ones, with a slightly better slope, so the views would be slightly better if you were in the middle half of it (If you were off at the edges, the view was terrible). These continued with the food and beverage options of the mid-sized places (Popcorn, nachos, hot dogs, candy, etc), but also tended to add things like a wide selection of ice cream and Icee's, maybe little personal pizzas, all sorts of stuff you'd expect at a sporting event other than booze. These became instantly popular when they opened, as the seating and amenities were a huge step up when they initially opened, and that drove off a lot of the smaller and mid-sized places. Some of these would later on add a few IMAX screens as well. However, over the last 10-15 years, that popularity has gone down for some of them, usually due to them simply being too big and crowded, the seating generally not being improved at all since they opened (And it was only a marginal improvement over what came before it), and usually located in very busy or crowded locations making parking a pain in the rear end.

The final main type are the newest multiplexes that opened within the last 15 or so years. These tend to have 10-20 theaters, so between the old mid-size places and the massive megaplexes, but the biggest changes is how the seating is arranged. The seating areas in these are much steeper than any of the older ones, with seating much more spaced out and well cushioned. Every seat will clearly have their own cupholders, and usually have a headrest, rather than the old, cheap folding stuff. Reclining seats of varying degrees are common, with some going almost completely horizontal, but still allowing enough space for people to pass around you. Unless the person in the seat ahead of you is like 6'11" or a child jumping on their seat, your view probably isn't going to get blocked. The screens themselves are also larger and you'll be a bit closer to them. These are almost all chains like Regal, so you're almost never gonna get like $1 tickets or steep discounts, but they aren't hugely expensive outside peak hours (poo poo like Friday or Saturday night for a movie in its first week or two). When I was going to movies semi-regularly, or there was something I really wanted to see in a theater, I usually checked places like this first. Like, I saw Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049 at a Regal with the RPX surround sound and both were amazing for that.

fartknocker has a new favorite as of 16:21 on Mar 4, 2021

Drunk Nerds
Jan 25, 2011

Just close your eyes
Fun Shoe
I loved the dollar theater that was down the street from me. I would watch on my lunch hour, because it didn't matter because it was $1. 45 minutes was just long enough to realize We Bought a Zoo was so-bad-it's-hilarious and I still think about how bad it was for the half-hour I was able to sit there and laugh.

The part I saw was when the zoo was going to be inspected so they run around papering over all this neglect and then the zoo inspector was literally a mustache-twirling guy who was supposed to be evil for the heinous crime of <checks notes> preventing animal abuse.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1389137/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=1

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
I loved working at those old 4 screen multiplexes. We had first run movies squeezing out their last bit of full price admission or art house films. So we had no customers. It was fun. It's since been bulldozed.

One weird thing that doesn't really exist anymore are the marquee boards. Nothing like climbing on the roof and changing out letters every Thursday. "Oh, I ran out of E's, here's a backwards 3." Getting a fresh box of letters was a great feeling.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Krispy Wafer posted:

I loved working at those old 4 screen multiplexes. We had first run movies squeezing out their last bit of full price admission or art house films. So we had no customers. It was fun. It's since been bulldozed.

One weird thing that doesn't really exist anymore are the marquee boards. Nothing like climbing on the roof and changing out letters every Thursday. "Oh, I ran out of E's, here's a backwards 3." Getting a fresh box of letters was a great feeling.

The theater I worked at had a marquee on the front of the building, and occasionally some rapscallion would climb up there and change the names of the movies.

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy
I worked at various movie theatres for most of my teen years and early twenties, mostly running the projection booth which came along with building new movies as they arrived, tearing down old ones as they departed, and changing the building & road signs for changes in what we were showing. AMA.

fun stuff off the top of my head from my time in theatres:

  • Using a 20-foot claw pole to try and hang letters on the side of the building was one of the more frustrating experiences in life. gently caress that poo poo sideways. I broke so many letters thinking I had it placed perfectly, only to release the claw and those plastic pieces of poo poo come tumbling down to the concrete
  • A friend of mine going to the back of the auditorium to piss into an Icee cup during an employee-only screening because he didn't want to miss any of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
  • Speaking of employee screenings - any projectionist who builds the movie also gets paid to watch it to make sure they didn't gently caress up, which was an amazing perk for 17 year old me. Over the course of many years and hundreds of builds, I fell asleep in exactly 3 employee screenings - the first was for M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and the other 2 were that awful Miami Vice movie with Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx and the Gerard Butler & Emmy Rossum version of Phantom of the Opera. I watched a ton of bad movies but those were the only ones that bored me to sleep.
  • The first movie I ever built was Ocean's 12 (what a piece of poo poo for my first one). We had a bunch of build tables and so I picked one to use cause no one told me otherwise and went to town building. Got it all done, everything looks good. We go to preview it and it looks like a cat took its claws to the entire thing - turns out that table had a roller with imperfections on it after years of use and no repairs - that poo poo isn't really noticeable to the human eye while building, but when film is ripping across it at several miles per hour it results in a sub-optimal viewing experience. Lesson learned.
  • It rained a LOT around us the week that Batman Begins debuted. During the first primetime showing at 7pm on the opening Friday, just before it started the ceiling tile directly above the platter our copy of BB was on started to collapse and was dripping water on the print. If you've never worked with film, one of the quickest ways to render large chunks of film entirely useless is to get it wet, as it will stick together and the ink will start to dissolve and rub off. That was an extraordinarily stressful night of having to hand out free poo poo while we scrambled to try and salvage it - luckily only a portion of it got wet so we were able to cut it out, but I'm sure there was an extremely awkward jump cut at whatever scene had to have a few seconds ripped out. I think I gave away at least 200 free tickets & 200 free popcorns that night.
  • Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows Part 2: We had a special thing we did for this where we booked midnight and 3am shows for opening night and showed the film in every auditorium we had - 14 different screens. However, we only got 4 copies of the film! In the projection business, this is handled by a process called "syncing" - there is a mechanism on projectors wherein you can sync them up and, when you press start on one, it starts all of the projectors currently in sync with it (there's some nuance here but that's the basic gist). Generally, a movie is "threaded" through only one projector, so it starts on Platter A of Projector # 1, runs through the actual Projector itself, and lands on Platter B of Projector #1 to be setup for the next show. However, during a sync, it instead does something like Platter A of Projector #1 -> Projector #1 -> Projector #2 -> Projector #3 -> Projector #4 -> Platter A of Projector #4, which results in a crazy web of film running overhead across the ceiling and walls going from one projector to another. Now do this for fourteen projectors with only four prints - you end up with 2 prints on 4 projectors and 2 prints on 3 projectors. I wish I still had the video I recorded of the pandemonium, but alas it has been lost to the annals of time and old cell phones. It was absolute mayhem but also extremely fun....
  • .......until you realize someone accidentally built one of the prints with reel #6 on backwards! Cue a bunch of moviegoers all flooding out of several auditoriums absolutely losing their poo poo going "WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING EVERYTHING IS BACKWARDS AND UPSIDE DOWN! THE AUDIO SOUNDS DEMONIC! WTF!?!" And they're absolutely right - another fun fact about movie prints is that the audio is also on the print itself, read by an optical laser as it passes through the projector. Consequently, when you run the film through the projector backwards, it runs the audio backwards too! We had to stop the show, cut the film at the beginning of reel #6, rip it out of the print, throw it on a build table to rewind it, then wind it back into the middle of the movie in the proper direction, and restart. Took about 30 minutes and so the next shows in those auditoriums got delayed by a half hour, but hey a bunch of people got a weird story out of it

Admiral Joeslop
Jul 8, 2010




I'm curious if theaters in other countries get hosed by the movie companies on ticket sales. Around here in the US, theaters are lucky to get some small percentage of sales after something like a month, if it's not a huge movie.

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy
That's all in the booking side of the business (read: controlled by corporate HQ, nothing to do with the individual theatres themselves), so that's the part I know the least about, but I'm fairly certain the answer is yes, just to varying degrees depending on the companies involved.

For some of the bigger films like anything Marvel, the theater may actually end up paying over 100% of the box office take for the opening weekend, because gently caress you we're disney that's why

Theatres make most of their operating money at concessions, which is why they give out free tickets like candy when something goes wrong, but free concession items are locked in fort knox

The real money, though, is in advertising, which is why all modern theatres have TVs plastered all over the walls playing ads nonstop and movie preshows keep getting longer and longer

kumba has a new favorite as of 21:52 on Mar 4, 2021

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

kumba posted:

That's all in the booking side of the business (read: controlled by corporate HQ, nothing to do with the individual theatres themselves), so that's the part I know the least about, but I'm fairly certain the answer is yes, just to varying degrees depending on the companies involved.

For some of the bigger films like anything Marvel, the theater may actually end up paying over 100% of the box office take for the opening weekend, because gently caress you we're disney that's why

Theatres make most of their operating money at concessions, which is why they give out free tickets like candy when something goes wrong, but free concession items are locked in fort knox

The real money, though, is in advertising, which is why all modern theatres have TVs plastered all over the walls playing ads nonstop and movie preshows keep getting longer and longer

I worked at one in the 90's so advertising wasn't a factor, but the tickets/concession bits haven't changed. I worked there for about 9 months, and we'd cycle count drink cups and popcorn buckets every few weeks, because that's how we measured how much was sold. You never threw out a bucket or cup, if one was hosed up, it got put aside as damaged.

At least when I started working there we threw out the popcorn and hot dogs at the end of the night (which were either eaten or taken home by the employees), then we got bought out by Regal Cinemas, and we were required to save that poo poo for the next day.

Volcott
Mar 30, 2010

People paying American dollars to let other people know they didn't agree with someone's position on something is the lifeblood of these forums.
I used to go to matinees at the Regal near here pretty regularly but it sure wasn't for the popcorn.

Pope Corky the IX
Dec 18, 2006


🎵 I'm blue
Yeah I'm a blue Shrek, guy
Step a foot in my swamp
And you're gonna die 🎵

Stuff like this is one of the reasons I’ve been on these forums for so long, thank you.

Zero One
Dec 30, 2004

HAIL TO THE VICTORS!
Are there any first run theaters still on film anymore?

And if not do second run theaters still have old film projectors? Do they make film just for discount places?

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

kumba posted:

The real money, though, is in advertising, which is why all modern theatres have TVs plastered all over the walls playing ads nonstop and movie preshows keep getting longer and longer

I'm not sure how true it is (I can't find my original source) but Thursday night became the biggest night for television because of ads for features coming out the next day. Networks stacked that night with their most popular shows so they could charge premiums for the commercial spots.

Everything in modern society comes back to advertising.

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy

Zero One posted:

Are there any first run theaters still on film anymore?

And if not do second run theaters still have old film projectors? Do they make film just for discount places?

I got out of the business in 2012 but I worked for both AMC & Regal between 2003 & 2012 and all the theatres I worked at or were familiar with were at least beginning their full digital conversion. In late 2011 we converted 4 of our 14 film projectors to digital ones so I got to work with both at once for a little while, but the writing was on the wall at that point. That was one of the primary reasons I switched careers - no more film means no more projectionists, as film nowadays arrives on hard drives that get uploaded into the projectors and then everything is just automated on a schedule, so I got replaced by technology. Progress!

Indie theatres & film festivals definitely still use a lot of film though, because IIRC a film print is still much cheaper than one of those hard drives, or at least it was 10 years ago - things may have changed by now

Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack
i grew up near one of the last multi-screen drive-ins on earth and it kicked so much rear end in my teens

disclaimer: i also like grungy cheap old theaters so ymmv

Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack
imo theaters would do well to divide first-run movies with screenings of older movies. i also really liked during game of thrones when some theaters bought a license to show the new episode each week. popular tv shows would be awesome to see more commonly in theaters, especially since with the growth in size and width of home tvs, the cinematography of television has become much more film-like

e: also with digital projection, you can literally just pop in a dvd. it doesn't look quite as good as film, but it still looks better than you'd expect, especially if its a 4k native remaster. i saw The Terminator in theaters a few years ago when regal was doing their classics series and it was deffo a bluray and i deffo didnt care

Cactus Ghost has a new favorite as of 23:48 on Mar 4, 2021

Boywhiz88
Sep 11, 2005

floating 26" off da ground. BURR!
I’m very lucky to have a small indie theater in my area. 90 seats. I’ve seen all sorts of movies at it. My first time there was for Predator, never seen it before due to known issues w its home releases. I’ve probably seen more movies there in the 2 years prior to COVID than I had in the decade prior of theater going.

Just a wonderful experience and awesome pop corn. Reasonable candy prices relatively, but I can’t help but sneak some of my off menu favorites from time to time. Also attached to a coffee shop which helps with those 10P showings! I’m grateful because it’s held on OK throughout the last year, and I cannot wait to return to normalcy and be all vaxed up in there.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

kumba posted:

14 different screens. However, we only got 4 copies of the film!

I’ve seen a really good demonstration of this online in photos, on a very large number of screens, but now I can’t find it.

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy
I thought of a few other things

  • People leaving their phones or wallets in cup holders was a near daily occurrence
  • I once found a diaper full of poo poo left under a seat in a kids movie. Kids movies are the worst, not only because parents are too tired to give a poo poo or just don't care to teach their children to clean up after themselves, but also because kids don't just dirty the floor in their own row - they gently caress up the rows in front and behind them as well. Also if the floor is carpeted, good luck sweeping up popcorn that has been trampled by an entire herd of 6-year-olds: we actually had a leaf blower for this and would just blast everything to the sides and front on these special occasions
  • Remember that terrible Mel Gibson movie from the mid-00s Apocalyptica? Probably not, but I sure do! See, every showing ushers have to do theatre walks to make sure the sound and picture are good, see if anyone won't shut the gently caress up, and get a rough count of the people in the auditorium. So here I am walking into the 1pm showing of this garbage to find a nearly empty theatre, save for the couple in the back row boning doggystyle without a care in the world. I guess the movie was boring enough that they needed their own excitement

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

kumba posted:

Also if the floor is carpeted, good luck sweeping up popcorn that has been trampled by an entire herd of 6-year-olds: we actually had a leaf blower for this and would just blast everything to the sides and front on these special occasions

Sounds like a good way to get popcorn lung.

I can hear the lawyer commercials now.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

kumba posted:

I thought of a few other things

  • I once found a diaper full of poo poo left under a seat in a kids movie. Kids movies are the worst, not only because parents are too tired to give a poo poo or just don't care to teach their children to clean up after themselves, but also because kids don't just dirty the floor in their own row - they gently caress up the rows in front and behind them as well. Also if the floor is carpeted, good luck sweeping up popcorn that has been trampled by an entire herd of 6-year-olds: we actually had a leaf blower for this and would just blast everything to the sides and front on these special occasions

Ugh, Quest for Camelot and Mulan. I don't recall Mulan being that bad, but no one gave a poo poo about Quest for Camelot. I remember going into that one and after the credits there were still parents and kids just not giving a gently caress, and I'm forced to clean all that poo poo.

These were the days before stadium seating, so we had a leaf blower to move everything down to the bottom. I didn't encounter a diaper, but I knew someone who did.

See also: Long movies, Titanic played for most of my tenure, and every time it was a leaf blower. I will say that all the male ushers did at least know exactly when Kate Winslett was topless, as a matter of fact that was when I was taught how to do a theater check on my first night.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
I watched The Parent Trap about 10 times, but not all at once. So 10 times in 5 to 15 minute chunks over a span of 2 months. Much like a Christopher Nolan film in IMAX with the bass turned to max, it's the way the director meant for us to best experience the movie.

Only good story I had was the kid who started throwing up and wouldn't stop. His mom leads him out of the theater, just a steady stream of puke all the way to the bathroom. He did stop once he got to the toilet.

You know that door gap between the carpeted lobby and the tile bathroom? Do you know much puke you can get into that crevasse? A lot. My co-worker looked at it and started acting like he was sick. I told him to cut it out. But no...he was really getting sick.

Zero One
Dec 30, 2004

HAIL TO THE VICTORS!
When I was a child/teen any time someone puked or make sounds like puking or the smell of puke it instantly got me sick too (I'm sure most people are the same).

In college I worked at an amusement park on the roller coasters. Within the first month I had cleaned up so much puke that I became (and still am) completely immune from getting sick from other people's puke.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Krispy Wafer posted:

Only good story I had was the kid who started throwing up and wouldn't stop. His mom leads him out of the theater, just a steady stream of puke all the way to the bathroom. He did stop once he got to the toilet.

An extremely relatable parent and hangover experience.

SacrificialGoat
Oct 8, 2003

Catjaw is a hero of the people
I've worked at Regal theaters a couple times in my life and they count every single popcorn bucket and bag and every soda cup and every drink and all the candy every single day to make sure none of it went missing. If more than $20 worth of containers went missing on your shift you'd get written up. Considering that at their prices that's like 3 bags, it definitely happened.

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.
I worked at a theater for one week so I could let all my friends into the pre-screening of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. We took a garbage bag of popcorn home with us at the end since I knew I wasn't coming back.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

SacrificialGoat posted:

I've worked at Regal theaters a couple times in my life and they count every single popcorn bucket and bag and every soda cup and every drink and all the candy every single day to make sure none of it went missing. If more than $20 worth of containers went missing on your shift you'd get written up. Considering that at their prices that's like 3 bags, it definitely happened.

Before mine became a Regal, some girl pissed off another girl and forgot to lock her till, so the pissee mashed a ton of buttons and then closed the till. Technically there was no money missing, but she got shitcanned for being really short.

Then there was this guy I knew from church, who figured out that if you printed out passes instead of tickets, no one looked for the cash, so whenever there were groups of 4 or more, he'd just print passes, and add to the adding machine, in the box, and then just pocket whatever the total was at the end of the night. He got caught when someone tried to get a refund on some passes, they couldn't exactly prove that he was stealing, so they just did the passive aggressive stop scheduling thing.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
My brain still has trouble looking a 1 cent paper cup and realizing it's valued at $4. In food service the value is in the food, not the packaging, but theater chain accountants can't even pretend popcorn kernels and syrup are worth anywhere near what they're charging. So yeah, if you want to see an AMC manager freak the gently caress out steal a sleeve of cups.

Best perk were taking the old movie posters home. A deep recess of my subconscious thinks it remembers managers taking home the trailers reels, but that sounds...weird.

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy
I at one point had over 100 posters but my collection has shrunk after giving away stuff over the years. Still have a Star Wars Episode 3 and a Return of the King poster both framed and a cool Scott Pilgrim holographic thing, and I do have a copy of the trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring somewhere

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit
When I moved almost 10 years ago I shed my posters unfortunatly. I do still have a trailer reel for Lethal Weapon 4. The thing back then for me was to snag trailers that were being tossed and use them as bookmarks

kumba
Nov 8, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

enjoy the ride

Lipstick Apathy
When I worked for AMC we never ever reused popcorn from the night before, but Regal absolutely did

Which reminds me of another weird one: we had a lady that would come in for an early afternoon show once a week or so and always order the same thing: small diet coke, small popcorn. Nothing strange there, except when we filled the popcorn she had a very specific request: the bottom 1/4 and top 1/4 was to be your standard popcorn from the popper. The middle bit, however, was to be filled with what she called the "old maids" instead.

See, a popcorn popper has a ton of small holes in the grate the popcorn sits on, so small broken bits and unpopped kernels would fall through. She would have us pull out the tray and just dump that poo poo into her bag, and then absolutely drench it in butter to the point where I'm pretty sure she had to have been eating it with a spoon.

I'm convinced her teeth were made of iron.

Drunk Nerds
Jan 25, 2011

Just close your eyes
Fun Shoe
In high school my one friend had a big truck with a huge bed that he never used. My other friend worked at a movie theater. He saved up like a week's worth of popcorn and one night we filled the truck bed with popcorn as a joke.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
Oh wow, so that wasn't a fever dream. People really did collect trailers. The best thing I ever snagged was the large vinyl banner for Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett in a sea of red staring into your very soul, but that's since been lost to time.

kumba posted:

When I worked for AMC we never ever reused popcorn from the night before, but Regal absolutely did

At General Cinema we popped the popcorn a week in advance. I'd draw little cartoon characters on the huge garbage bags because why not. One time I brought down a bag with POPPY still doing his happy dance. I hadn't popped popcorn at that location for 2 weeks. And somehow our popcorn still tasted better than AMC's.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Krispy Wafer posted:

Oh wow, so that wasn't a fever dream. People really did collect trailers. The best thing I ever snagged was the large vinyl banner for Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett in a sea of red staring into your very soul, but that's since been lost to time.


At General Cinema we popped the popcorn a week in advance. I'd draw little cartoon characters on the huge garbage bags because why not. One time I brought down a bag with POPPY still doing his happy dance. I hadn't popped popcorn at that location for 2 weeks. And somehow our popcorn still tasted better than AMC's.

I worked there when there was really nothing good, so Lethal Weapon 4 was the best I could do. I tell you what though, I still have all of the buttons that ever graced my uniform. The Red and White Free Truman and the lenticular Species 2 were particularly sought after.

wankel13b
Jan 23, 2005

quak
I mixed up all this fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, t-t-then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa - and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. And I never felt so bad in my entire life!

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wankel13b
Jan 23, 2005

quak
I haven't found any links to support it, but I thought I had heard that one of the Star Wars prequels, maybe Episode I, the theaters had to pay 110% of the box office the first weekend or something like that.

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