More on the Marquee-Hoodlums ticket-fee war
The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.
The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.
The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:
Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.
“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”
New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.
PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.
8:00 PM
The fake Imax scam
Imax made its name on gynormous, 70-foot-tall screens and a mind-blowing cinematic resolution, based on its use of an extravagantly large 70-mm film.
So it makes perfect sense that the company has now expanded to include … smaller theaters that lack the unique resolution and the screen size.
The new Imaxes have been creeping into the valley; I had my first experience with one at the Deer Valley AMC this weekend.
There are two ways of looking at it. Compared to a normal movie at a normal screen in the multiplex, it was better.
But compared to an Imax—a real IMax— it couldn’t compare.
But guess with which of those two alternatives the fake Imax shares the $14 ticket price?
It turns out that AMC has cut a deal with Imax to retrofit about 100 of its screens nationwide into fake Imaxes. They go in and cut out a bunch of the crummy seats at the front of the room, and then push a new, taller screen up closer to the rest of the auditorium.
As I said, a real Imax screen might be 70 feet high. The new ones I’ve read—and someone at AMC told me—are 40 feet, but the one I saw Avatar at in Deer Valley didn’t seem anywhere near that. I’d say it was more like 30.
The projection is apparently digital—I’m still trying to find that out. Even if it’s one of the next-generation Sony projectors, though, it’s still going to be significantly inferior to traditional Imax when it comes to conventional film.
I don’t know enough about the subject to know how this breaks down with contemporary digital animation or hybrid conceptions like Avatar. To my eye it just looked normal god digital projection—i.e., lacking the ooomph of a real Imax. (The sound, however, was excellent.)
The theaters now have big Imax signs outside … but nothing that tell people it’s not a traditional Imax screen.
You can read more about this in stories by Patrick Goldstein of the LA TImes here and here.
You’ll note that in the second piece, a scrambling Imax capo says he’s going to do more to let people know what they are getting:
[…] I asked [Imax CEO Richard] Gelfond why Imax doesn’t simply offer more truth in advertising. If the hot button issue is theater size, why not put up signage outside its theaters that tells consumers what size the theater screen is? […]
Gelfond initially hedged, saying “we’re thinking about doing that kind of thing.” He was concerned that simply identifying the screen size might be somewhat misleading, since in the retrofitted theaters, the first few rows of seating have been removed, allowing the screen to be closer to moviegoers, which Gelfond says provides an enhanced cinema experience. “The screen might only be 55 feet, but in that setting, it looks like it’s 80 feet,” he explained.
a) There’s no way the screen I was at was any where near 55 feet high. b) Goldstein didn’t call Gelfond on the utter nonsensicality of his last quote, which reminded me in some tangential way of that old Kids in the Hall skit about putting your fingers up close to your eyes and pretending to pinch the head of someone sitting across the room. I mean, McDonald’s doesn’t say, “Yeah, the new Big Mac is half as size, but we think you’ll find that as you move it to your mouth to take a bite it will seem just as big as the old one!” c) And here’s a guy misleading people saying he can’t stop misleading them because … it would be misleading them.
Upshot: Fake Imax is a big ripoff. It’s a nice theater. But:
a) AMC shouldn’t be charging people Imax prices;
b) AMC should be telling people it’s not a real Imax;
c) And the local press should be doing more disclosure about this as well.
p.s.: On a side note, as you read all the press about Avatar breaking box-office records, remember that its grosses are significantly boosted by the steep $2-to-$4 premium movie-goers are paying for 3D and Imax showings as well as increased ticket prices overall. I keep reading that it’s the second-highest-grossing movie ever, behind only Titanic. In inflation-adjusted dollars alone, however, it’s right up there with … Back to the Future and Animal House. And the 3D and Imax surcharges have probably inflated even that metric.#
7:00 AM
Ticketmaster-by-the-Lake, continued
A few days ago, Hoodlums, the Tempe record store, announced it wouldn’t sell folks tickets to the upcoming Phoenix show at the Marquee. (That’s Phoenix the French rock band.) The store was protesting a new $3 fee added by the promoter, Lucky Man.
Details here.
This a.m. PHXated, considering going to the show, took a whack at buying tickets online. $25, the stated price, seemed fair.
But the following is what I ended up with:
Lucky Man added, for no reason I could see, a $6.50 “service fee” per ticket.
Then wanted to charge me $2.50 for printing out the tickets myself—that’s the “delivery fee.”
… And then charged me another $3 under the rubrick “order fee.”
The total, $34.25 per ticket, is a nearly 40 percent markup—for a show at the promoter’s own venue, using the promoter’s own online ticketing system.
2:09 AM
Ticketmaster-by-the-lake: Hoodlums refuses to sell Marquee tix with excessive service fees
Hoodlums, the Tempe Record store, has posted a blistering letter on Facebook. It says that the Marquee, the rock club just north of Tempe Town Lake on Mill, has added a new $3 ticket fee onto tickets the store sells to Marquee shows.
According to the store, they’ve done business with the club and its management, Lucky Man Productions, in the past the same way they do business with other promoters: They get tix to shows and sell them to customers, adding on a $1 service fee.
The store says it won’t sell tickets with an added $3 fee. PHXated is a student of Ticketmaster’s remarkable and reprehensible business model; we consider Hoodlums’ statement of the issues involved trenchantly put:
We add on our dollar, and everyone is happy. No deception. No service charge for anything other than actual service.
Then we get our Phoenix tickets [i.e., the band Phoenix, which has an upcoming show at the Marquee], and we are being asked to start collecting three bucks above the advertised ticket price? Like we said: We don’t do that. We charge ticket price plus a buck, not ticket price plus four bucks. That’s not a fair price. Besides, why would we collect an extra service fee for someone else’s service, especially when that “someone else” hasn’t provided ANY extra service[?]
If the venue wants to charge extra for their service, that’s their prerogative to negotiate the higher ticket price. If the venue wants to charge extra at its own box office, so be it. If the promoter, or the artist, or management, or anyone involved in the negotiations needs to charge $28 for the tickets in order to make ends meet, we aren’t in a position to debate that either. While it is our sincere belief that concerts in general need to be cheaper in order for the concert industry to thrive again, setting the ticket price is none of our business. You need to make an extra three bucks? Make it a $28 ticket. Don’t make it a $25 ticket and ask us to collect $28.
7:00 AM