No more 9:00 shows

[Frank Cox]

You mean that extra buck isn't going to save them?

[Martin Brooks]

I just realized that our nearby AMC has their latest shows at 6:30pm! Even on the weekend. I wanted to check out the latest Johnny Knoxville flick, and the last show they had for the day was at 6pm on a Saturday night. Not even a 7:15 show. They had a 1/3:30/6 schedule. I think that's leaving money on the table.

My bet is that AMC won't be around much longer.

[Andrew Thomas]

In a town of 25,000, you may leave A LOT of money on the table with that schedule. If I were you I would start with more days, more shows and whittle it down as necessary after a few months. Doing it the other way, you may never have a need to add shows or days.

We're in a town of only 1,700 (about 6,000 in our drawing area), and we are open every night except Thursdays when we are changing shows. (If we are running something for two or three weeks, we will go straight through without closing.) Thursday, Friday and Saturday is when virtually everything ELSE is also going on -- ball games, school events, concerts, big-ass parties, you name it... and a lot of those events will tie up whole families. Why be closed all the nights when people have nothing to do? I can tell you that here, most weekends Sunday is busier than Friday and sometimes it even beats Saturday. We have many regulars who ONLY come on weeknights, because that's the only time they haven't got anything else going on. Yes, some nights we only have two or four or six people...but sometimes we have 60. That's show biz. The important thing is we're HERE for them and they know we are going to be here when they leave their house.

The movie business is about "habit" as much as anything. People get into the habit of going to the show....and if you're closed too often when they have the notion to go to the movies, pretty soon they will stop having the notion. Naturally, people will get used to whatever schedule you offer, but there are going to be a lot of folks who will tell you, "I wanted to come and see that show but I just had too much going on." We even get that with our schedule, occasionally.

And only being open three or four nights a week will cut you out of being able to open some movies on the break, too -- the studios definitely favor full-week schedules. With the video window now being anywhere from six weeks down to 17 days, you need to get movies as fast as you can.

Of course your mileage may vary but this is 43 years of experience talking here.

The only reason we were ever open Monday-Wednesday since I opened in 2013 was for our staff to get full time hours. We at best broke even Monday-Wednesday when accounting for just film rental, labor, and utilities (it’s Houston, we have to run the AC 11 months of the year!) unless we had an absolute banger like an Avengers flick.

No studio has ever cared what our schedule was beyond Friday-Sunday.

[Eric Thuemmel]

I just realized that our nearby AMC has their latest shows at 6:30pm! Even on the weekend. I wanted to check out the latest Johnny Knoxville flick, and the last show they had for the day was at 6pm on a Saturday night. Not even a 7:15 show. They had a 1/3:30/6 schedule. I think that's leaving money on the table.

Our theater's latest shows have been consistently at 7:30pm. We've tried some later hours, but since we're a community theater it's hard to get volunteers to come in late. I think 9-9:30pm shows would work great in the summer (it doesn't get dark until well after 9 from June-August where I live) but it's too hard to staff.

EVERYONE is short-staffed right now, so I'll chalk it up to that. Maybe by summer things will be closer to normal?

[Mike Blakesley]

I'm pretty much certain we will be either Thurs-Sun or Fri-Sun only outside of school holidays, where we will operate all week. I'm guessing Sundays we probably will only have our 1 and 4 shows,

In a town of 25,000, you may leave A LOT of money on the table with that schedule. If I were you I would start with more days, more shows and whittle it down as necessary after a few months. Doing it the other way, you may never have a need to add shows or days.

We're in a town of only 1,700 (about 6,000 in our drawing area), and we are open every night except Thursdays when we are changing shows. (If we are running something for two or three weeks, we will go straight through without closing.) Thursday, Friday and Saturday is when virtually everything ELSE is also going on -- ball games, school events, concerts, big-ass parties, you name it... and a lot of those events will tie up whole families. Why be closed all the nights when people have nothing to do? I can tell you that here, most weekends Sunday is busier than Friday and sometimes it even beats Saturday. We have many regulars who ONLY come on weeknights, because that's the only time they haven't got anything else going on. Yes, some nights we only have two or four or six people...but sometimes we have 60. That's show biz. The important thing is we're HERE for them and they know we are going to be here when they leave their house.

The movie business is about "habit" as much as anything. People get into the habit of going to the show....and if you're closed too often when they have the notion to go to the movies, pretty soon they will stop having the notion. Naturally, people will get used to whatever schedule you offer, but there are going to be a lot of folks who will tell you, "I wanted to come and see that show but I just had too much going on." We even get that with our schedule, occasionally.

And only being open three or four nights a week will cut you out of being able to open some movies on the break, too -- the studios definitely favor full-week schedules. With the video window now being anywhere from six weeks down to 17 days, you need to get movies as fast as you can.

Of course your mileage may vary but this is 43 years of experience talking here.

[Andrew Thomas]

I'm definitely bouncing around exactly what our schedule should be when we reopen the 4 screen in a small-ish town (about 25,000 in the city limits, and 45,000 within 7 or 8 miles). I'm pretty much certain we will be either Thurs-Sun or Fri-Sun only outside of school holidays, where we will operate all week. I'm guessing Sundays we probably will only have our 1 and 4 shows, Friday just our 4 and 7s, and Saturday 1/4/7. As needed, we can add showtimes and eventually days.

[William Kucharski]

I used to always go to midnight shows; sadly now I have to go earlier, but I'm not happy about it.

When the last show starts at 7 PM, that's just too early for me and I'll wait for it to be released on home video.

I'm used to midnight shows; and I remember the fun of going to a 3 AM IMAX showing of Avengers: Endgame and getting out at 6:30 AM.

[Martin Brooks]

Not the case in NYC, in spite of the pandemic raging here (although declining from its peak). At the AMC Lincoln Square, there are numerous Thursday night shows starting from 9:15 through 10pm and at the AMC Empire 25 from 9:15 to 10:30pm. On Friday and Saturday night, there are also some 11pm shows.

[Martin McCaffery]

Just looked a Birmingham's schedules. Most are doing weekend shows as late as 10:00pm, but 8:00 as late as it gets on weekdays.
Birmingham is a much larger city than Montgomery. Mobile and Huntsville are also scheduled similar to Birmingham. I guess Montgomery is just old and boring as a movie town.

[Scott John]

We have had to adjust our schedules so our latest movie doesn't start later than 8pm..8:30 at the latest. Our numbers have generally been pretty atrocious for those late shows. We are more of an arthouse theatre so our main audience is families for early matinees and the 45+ crowd for evening movies.

We actually started doing better by adding a 2:45 show in the afternoon instead and we get a lot more seniors and older folks out who want to be home by dark or may not want to navigate the snow and weather at night. Unfortunately those folks don't buy a lot of concession items, but at least we are getting butts in the door. Our main weekday times are 2:45; 5:15; and 7:45 with the later movies adjusting for movie length if required.

With the nearby chain multiplex having only designated seating due to Covid restrictions I spent a little time popping on seeing what their late show numbers were and they were bad too once the start times were after 9pm. I guess with 6 screens they can afford just have a couple employees stay late and it is still worthwhile even if they are only getting 4-6 people per screen on late shows.

[Martin McCaffery]

I've joked that we may be the first theatre in America to eliminate all evening shows, but it looks like some of you may beat me to it!

[Mike Rivest]

And don't forget to factor in longer commuting times.

[James Wyrembelski]

I'm seeing more and more smaller places getting rid of the evening shows on Sunday as well. Daytime shows on Sundays have always been worth it and have always been one of our best times of the week.

I reinstated Sunday nights later in 2020 but I wish I would have eliminated them after the holidays. Good example was this last Sunday. Had about 100 for the 3pm show of Sing 2 only to nosedive down to 5 patrons for the 7pm. They make sense in the summer but I think they need to go in the winter.

We did the 9pm shows when we first reopened back in 2018. Sometimes they could do pretty good business, but generally it was pretty quiet. I would hold staff because you never knew if it was going to do any business or not. We always tried to get the auditorium spotless after the 7 show as well. Between trying to clean up, get people out, and some of the folks showing up early waiting to get in. It just didn't make sense for the few extra that may or may not show late in the evening and pay people to hang out just in case, stress about getting everything back together in time, and get home at 12am-2am.

Pretty much all of the people that would attend the late shows just came to the regular 7pm show after eliminating them. I noticed no real difference in gross.

[Adam Fraser]

We used to do 7:00 PM and 9:00-10:00 PM on 100% of shows from Memorial to Labor Day, and on Friday and Saturday the rest of the year if the film warranted it. We stopped several years ago when the late shows dwindled to a point that it just was not worth it. We got tired of getting home from work at 12:30-2:00 AM for just an extra couple hundred per week in gross sales.

I have noticed now that with our reduced schedule that we did not lose much in total grosses and don't anticipate bringing them back other than the occasional summer blockbuster.

Unless business gets back to where it was in the late 90's (unlikely) we will continue to chug along with 7:00 PM only shows for the foreseeable future. 20+ years of 60+ hour weeks is enough for us when combined with the retail business that we run during the day.

[Lyle Romer]

Back in the day (mid/late 90's) I used to find that the most popular show time was 8:30-8:45 on a weekend. We only ever had that with multiple prints usually or something with a very long running time where we'd have a 5PM and then 8:30 PM and no late show except maybe on Fri or Sat if running midnight shows.

People seemed to like it, especially on the weekend, because they could go out to eat at around 6 and still make the movie without stress.