MartinBlank

My town isn't very big, we have two theater chains, one with 9 and one with 11 screens. The latter is the newere theater with stadium seating and kicked-assed sound, the former sucks. Anyway, this Memorial Day weekend both theaters are sharing 4 films on their screens, X-Men, DaVinci Code, Over The Hedge, and Poseidon ALL with multiple screening at each theater...basically, about 6 total film showing on 20 screens.

My question: Is it normal for competing theaters to show the same films? I've never seen this done...not with Star Wars, SpiderMan, or the LOTR trilogy. Why all of a sudden?

Taking into account that one theater is far superior to the other AND that they charge the same, to me it's a no brainer as to where to go, and I hope it would be a no-brainer for others also.

mikehunt

around here they always do that with the main movies of that week
the stuff that's been out for a few weeks or isn't a big draw will have some variety between theaters, but stuff like x-men, superman next month, da vinci, etc the opening week or two will be at every theater in town

mdc3000

It's pretty much the norm...especially when movies are opening on more and more screens, thus more bookings. I know it used to happen less in my area, until one of the chains was BOUGHT out by another chain, now since they're all owned by the same parent, they can book the same movies and not worry about area exclusivity or anything.

MATT

Brent L

Yeah, I've been seeing this for as long as I can remember.

I thought it was going over the edge when a local theater with 20 screens was showing Ice Age 2 on over half of them though.