 |
There's plenty of ways to spend money on a girlfriend/boyfriend. You can get each other gifts, maybe even jewelry made of precious metals; you can take one another out to dinner, or a play, or a symphony. Then there is what is probably the most popular these days: taking you date to the movies.
The movies seem like a great way to spend, or at least kick off, an evening. They are (hopefully) entertaining, give you a visual and auditory experience not available at home, and they aren't too expensive either: under $10 per person in most of the US(1). It's a nice, cheap way to spend some time with your date, and be entertained at the same time.
However movie tickets have been rocketing up in price(2), faster than the rate of inflation(3). In 2003, the rate of inflation was 2.2%, whereas movie ticket prices increased 3.9%. This is somewhat confusing, while blockbuster effects flicks are certainly more expensive, ticket prices are high across the board. You pay the same money for a $60,000,000 movie like The Matrix as you do for a $60,000 film like Pi.
So what, really, is the cost of a movie ticket? When you get right down to it, you pay your eight bucks for a little piece of paper, which you can then trade for an admission to a show. Just how much is that little piece of paper worth, in, say precious metals? To answer this you need a movie ticket to a recent film, a precision scale, and a couple of bored geeks. Having all those things on hand, we set out to find out just what the value of a movie ticket really was.
We decided to use Fahrenheit 911 as our test subject. It doesn't really matter which movie we used, as the tickets are the same for all of them, however it seemed appropriate. Michael Moore, and his supporters, seem to think his words are golden, and the money he's making will keep him in milk and cookies for quite some time. It has easily made enough to make him worth well more than his weight in platinum, quite a feat (somewhere between $3.7 and $5 million dollars, depending on what measurement of his weight you believe).
Here in Tucson, movie tickets to normal shows tend to run about $8.50, as the picture indicates. Not the cheapest in the nation, but certainly not the most expensive. For that you get a tiny little piece of paper that will allow you into a theatre, should you so desire. They are even so nice that they let you keep it, with only minor damage, after you've seen the show to remind you of the amount you spent. Well we took this off to the cleanroom in our building, and weighed it on a precision Mettler scale, which is accurate to the 1,000th of a gram (and measures to the 10,000th). Here is the result:
So looks like our little ticket weighs 0.724 grams, not much at all. Well, how does that compare to precious metals? Depends on the day, metals are a commodity that is traded, and as such the price fluctuates. If we look at the historical prices(4) of gold, we find the price fluctuates quite a bit, but the averages is roughly $380 per troy ounce, which is quite close to the current price of gold ($394 on the New York exchange at the time of writing).
Now as you might have noticed, despite the world going almost completely metric, metals are still traded in troy ounces. Well, there are 0.0321507 grams, per troy ounce, so our movie ticket weighs 0.023 troy ounces. That means that these tickets are worth about $370 per troy ounce.
Thus we discover that yes; in fact, a movie ticket IS worth its weight in gold these days. And the movie industry wonders why there are accusations of overcharging.
So next time you treat your significant other to a movie, you might want to remind them that this time you are buying with them is golden. Literally.
Jim Logan contributed to the creation of this article (it was his movie ticket).
|
|
