Conflict of Interests

The show must go on, even if it's 10:30 a.m.
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"If a movie sticks around at the Garden, it's an indicator it is profitable, Ms. Stephens said. She adds that many complain that the Garden Theater shows movies for too long, but that is the key to making money.
"The longer they're there, that means we're doing well with it," she says."

This is a pretty tired topic by now, and I'm sure anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about the issue of the theater-distributor revenue split, but I thought that this statement captures the precise problem with the way the distribution/exhibition deal is structured.

Simply put, the interests of the theater should align more naturally with the people that go.

The fact that they don't is just a result of convoluted business architecture. While this is a model that has been viable for a long time, as I've expressed in recent posts, the people watching movies are no longer going to tolerate things like this in the face of all of the other choice they know is possible.

But philosophically, this is a call for more intuitive and direct business relationships. Technology is the new middleman and his cut tends to be pretty small