Sounds awful! In our city movies are $5/person on Tuesdays (any movie, including brand new releases) and is only a few minutes drive. So just wanted to say this is not the same everywhere :)
Personally I find the quality of the cinema projectors to be lacking, but I still enjoy going.
I live next to one of like 8 laser projection IMAX theaters. If I can't watch an eye candy movie at that theatre I prefer to watch at home since my home theatre on average out performs most screens.
How you can walk into a theatre and have it be out of focus I can't even begin to imagine. Even the sound is worse. This is an industry that needs some weeding.
I see perhaps 1.5 movies per year, mostly because the value proposition is not good.
To see a single movie in the non-shitty cinema, with a drink and popcorn will run me up about $35AU. I still have to watch 20 minutes worth of ads at the beginning too, so we'll boost that up to $40AU for wasting my time and brainpower. That gets me about 2hrs entertainment.
Why would I do that when I can pirate your movie in a few months and watch it at home, infinitely cheaper? Only the rare exceptional movie is actually worth the "cinematic experience" (ie. Dunkirk). Something like Guardians of the Galaxy or Deadpool is perfectly fine watching on my TV and Soundbar.
You can skip the ads and tell people off for talking during the movie in your own home too.
For mainstream/action-blockbuster viewers, a huge screen with a hard-hitting sound system makes a huge difference. Some people like the reclining seats and food service (though that's not for me.)
For indie/foreign film lovers, cinemas are some of the only places where you can even see many films. Some never come out on streaming sites.
There's also the simple fact that nearly all film-makers intend their movies to be watched on the big screen. Any deviance from that means you're not getting the correct experience. Watching Lawrence of Arabia on your little iPhone, streaming from freemoviez23.net is not even close to the original 70mm glory of that movie. Hell, even 35mm movies look so much better when projected from film - that wonderful fuzziness. It's something like how old NES games were meant to look good on CRT TVs.
As someone who finds just as much interest in sound quality as the lyrics, as critical of the picture as the storyline, I whole-heartedly agree. Most movie theaters are simply horrible. The sound is atrocious (overly loud and muddy is the most common problem) and the pictures have become dimmer and dimmer. Having to travel further to find a good screen just makes movie theaters that much worse. Give me a Blu-ray and my home setup for quality over most movie theaters.
I used to get most movies off of Netflix and then see action movies in the theaters. I thought that I was better off seeing the spectacle on a large screen. But the technical inferiority of the typical movie theater has led me to flip my viewing habits. Now I really only see comedies in the theaters and watch everything else at home.
You still can't replicate a crowded movie theater at a comedy, it makes it far funnier to laugh with other people.
Maybe if you have thousands of dollars to spend on a home-cinema, it's not worth it but you can't really replicate the cinema experience both in terms of being blasted by the speakers and socially.
Seeing an awful film in a cinema is a hard experience to describe and/or replicate, for example.
You should find a smaller cinema then. In my experience only huge ventures like Cinestar can afford to behave so badly to their customers, whereas independent cinemas have excellent service (and sometimes are even cheaper!).
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