Episode Details

The Fifty-Dollar Movie Ticket
Hollywood, Beijing, and What It Means for Investors Over Fifty-Five
Podcast script  ·  Truesdell
When I was growing up, a movie ticket cost a couple of dollars. You walked into the theater on a Saturday afternoon, you bought a box of popcorn, and you settled in. It was not a special occasion. It was a Saturday. That model is gone.
This spring, Regal Cinemas sold opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three for fifty dollars apiece in their 70-millimeter IMAX house. Premium tickets now average eighteen dollars nationwide. They run as high as thirty in New York and Los Angeles. A standard adult ticket on a regular screen is about thirteen dollars. The dollar matinee is a memory.
That price gap — from a couple of dollars to fifty — is the story I want to walk through with you today. It is a story about how the theater business has changed. It is a story about the kinds of movies Hollywood is making and is not making. It is a story about the quiet competition the Chinese government has been running against American culture for the better part of twenty years. And it is a story about where I think an investor over fifty-five ought to be paying attention right now.
Part One: Why the Ticket Got Expensive
Every spring, the theater industry gathers in Las Vegas for a convention called CinemaCon. Cinema United, formerly the National Association of Theatre Owners, runs the event. About six thousand industry professionals from more than eighty countries attend. The 2026 convention was held in April at Caesars Palace and was described as the largest in the organization's history.
The Wall Street Journal sent reporters to cover it, and the price story came through clearly. Theater attendance in the United States is down more than a third from pre-pandemic levels. Fewer people are going to the movies. But the people who do go are spending more. AMC's chief executive told reporters that the average customer now spends about nine dollars on concessions per visit, nearly double what it was before COVID. Premium large-format screens — laser projection, immersive sound, big screens — now make up a growing share of total box office. Theaters have learned what the airlines learned twenty years ago: charge the loyal customer more, dress up the product, and call it an experience.
Not everyone in Hollywood is happy about this. Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures, used his CinemaCon platform to argue that ticket prices have climbed so high that going to the movies has become a special-occasion purchase rather than a routine one. He wants prices to come down. The theater owners pushed back. Their answer was straightforward: the studios are producing about twenty-five percent fewer films than they did before the pandemic. With fewer titles to fill the calendar, the economics force higher prices on the films that do release.
Both sides are right. Fewer movies, higher prices, fewer customers, more spending per customer. That is the business today. For the consumer over fifty-five who remembers when a movie was an ordinary weekend habit, the change is real. The casual matinee is gone. What replaces it is a planned outing — closer in cost and feel to a nice dinner than to a Saturday afternoon at the mall.
Part Two: What the Movies Used to Stand For
I want to step back from the dollars for a moment and talk about the films themselves, because the change there has been just as significant.
For a long stretch of American history, our movies carried a point of view. They did not preach. The good ones never preach. But they had a backbone. John Wayne made The Green Berets in 1968, in the middle of an unpopular war, and he put his name and his face on a picture that took the soldier's side. Conservatives have argued for decades that Hollywood lost that nerve somewhere along the way, that the studios in Burbank grew uncomfortable with flags, with uniforms, with anything that looked too much like