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Is National Cinema Day happening this year? I can't get a straight answer online!
So last year, the day after National Cinema Day, I saw this Tildes thread:
https://tildes.net/~movies/19s7/today_is_us_national_cinema_day_what_are_you_going_to_go_see_for_4
Apparently I missed out on the year's biggest discount day... No biggie, I'd go next year!
My phone's calendar said it would be on August 25th 2024, so I set a reminder. I check this morning, and see... normal priced movies?
I look it up, and I see Regal's website hasn't been updated since 2023, 99% of news articles are still about 2023, and the articles about 2024 say either September or October dates. The subreddit for cinema employees as recently as 11 days ago had no clue when it would be.
Does anyone on Tildes know what's going on?
On the box office forum I'm on, a guy with connections in the theatrical exhibition industry stated that it isn't happening anytime soon this year. NCD happened in 2022 and 2023 during a lull in releases (which was August/September). The issue is that the next few weeks we're seeing movies that are expected to hit it big. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Transformer One, Joker 2, Venom 3. And the studios won't want that lowered ticket price to impact OW grosses, or even second weekend grosses. And because the films are spaced the way they are, the soonest studios would be willing to do it is November. Although there's a good chance it just doesn't happen this year.
If that's the case, today would've been a decent time to have it, wouldn't it? Deadpool came out a month ago now. Of course it'd be my luck that something like this dies once someone tells me.
Heres the discussion page where we talked about this.
I think studios just didn’t find it necessary since the late summer went so well for them. Alien Romulus and It Ends With Us did better than what people expected and the August overall is stronger than last year’s August.
That’s the only reason I can come up with. But I think it’s a shame. I think it should be a yearly tradition and it surely felt like that was the case.
I think it's really short sided of them to not do this. In telling everyone there was a special movie fan's "holiday", they got me to mark a reminder on my phone to book a cinema visit one year in advance. People like to have special little days to do things. It could've been a big deal if they stuck with it. If they properly scheduled around it, the studios could've gotten a lot of butts in seats for otherwise unpopular movies and the theaters could've sold a lot of concessions.
I’m sure the May releases would have benefitted from such a thing. I do wonder why talks weren’t happening for this weekend. Sure now or even a week ago this would have been too late to set up and market. But why weren’t discussions happening in May for this?
Yeah I don’t get it myself.
It seems to be happening in the UK: https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a61947326/national-cinema-day-2024/
Great shout-out! I had no idea this was a thing, I'll definitely take it up!
Glad I could be of help! I saw a lot of articles mentioning the one in the UK. I also saw articles mentioning it happening in India. I saw a lot less consensus about the US though...