The incredible expanding popcorn price
You think the movie tickets are high? At the ShoWest convention in Vegas, the talk is of global warming fueling a rate hike for cineplex popcorn.
LAS VEGAS -- Global warming has had a strange effect on Hollywood, such as stars trading in their sports cars for hybrids and Al Gore winning an Oscar. But its latest impact may also be its corniest.
As a consequence of the booming demand for alternative fuels -- with farmers replanting acres of popcorn with more profitable crops that can be converted into ethanol and other biofuels -- the sellers of the nation's favorite movie snack say the salty tub will soon take a bigger bite out of your wallet when you're at the multiplex.
"The consumer will probably see an increase in popcorn prices pretty soon," said Carlton Smith, the chairman of Iowa's Jolly Time popcorn brand.
Popcorn: In some copies of today's Calendar section, an article about popcorn prices said that a typical kernel used to expand about 35% and now increases as much as 50%. It should have said 35 times its size and now 50 times its size.
While the price hike will likely be modest, perhaps no more than 15 cents a serving, the rise is inevitable and necessary, according to the popcorn providers and theater owners gathered here for ShoWest, the annual convention of the National Assn. of Theater Owners, which ended Thursday.
Movie audiences have long complained that pricey concessions -- along with chatty moviegoers, in-theater advertising and the crummy quality of many new releases -- have made watching movies at home often more attractive than going to theaters. While box-office grosses are rising because of higher ticket prices, with 2007's take totaling $9.6 billion, annual admissions are essentially flat, hovering around 1.4 billion tickets sold each year.
But if audiences worry that movie snacks are too expensive, they need to know those $5 buckets of popcorn ($4.75 for a large at Southern California's Laemmle theaters, but that comes with free refills) is what keeps the average national admission price around $7.
"If we didn't charge as much for concessions as we did, the tickets to the movies would cost $20," said Mike Campbell, chairman and chief executive of Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's largest theater chain with 6,300 screens.
Concession sales are a theater's lifeblood, accounting for as much as 45% of profits at the nation's largest chains. Popcorn offers one of the biggest returns on investment for exhibitors, because the unpopped kernels used to make an entire bucket of popcorn cost just a few pennies.
But the cost that the mostly Midwestern farmers are charging for raw popcorn has doubled in the last two years, and the wholesale fees popcorn providers are charging theaters is starting to climb almost as fast. In addition to affecting the cost of movie-theater popcorn, fans of microwave versions may notice a markup as well.
