Randolph B. Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (who is not to be confused with Slate's "News Quiz" writer Randy Cohen), raises an interesting question about movie-ticket prices (see "In Praise of Movie Ticket Prices"). Namely: Why do movie theaters always charge the same amount, regardless of how good or bad the movie in question might be? Movie-ticket prices vary, of course, but only depending on factors such as whether the buyer is a child or an adult or whether the ticket is purchased in the afternoon or in the evening. Why not charge a premium for movies that, for one reason or another, might be more worth seeing than other movies? To quote Cohen:

Wouldn't people pay more to see Titanic than Wild, Wild West?

Cohen does not mean to suggest that movie studios should charge more for movies that cost more to make (as Edgar Bronfman, who was "just smart enough to get it completely wrong," once proposed). Cohen explains:

The price you sell a unique good for is not determined by what it cost to make it. It cost Van Gogh little to paint "Sunflowers," but that doesn't mean he or anyone else should sell it for little. Instead, the price is based on consumers' willingness to pay. And presumably people would be willing to pay more for the best movies, so why not charge more for them?

Chatterbox assumes that Cohen would define "best movies" not according to subjective aesthetic criteria but rather according to how many people want to see them. By this definition, a popular movie would be a "better" movie than an unpopular one. Under Cohen's hypothetical scheme, a studio's response to a movie's popularity would not be the current, egalitarian method of opening it in more theaters, but the inegalitarian method of pricing the "better" movies out of many people's reach. (Poorer people would have to rent.) It sounds barbaric, but such demand-based pricing goes on all the time with other commodities, even other entertainment commodities:

Broadway does seem to charge more for big hits like Les Miz, and the effect is even more extreme in pay-per-view cable, where prices range from $3 to $50 depending on the appeal of the event. Similarly the software business has huge "desirability premia"--Microsoft Office costs far more than competitors that presumably had similar development costs. Publishing seems to be in between--books by [Michael] Crichton, [Stephen] King, and other superstars appear to get a small premium (about $3 more in hardback based on a casual flip through Amazon). [Chatterbox pauses here to note that the big superstores have also been known to do the precise opposite--i.e., sell the most popular books and cd's at a specially low discount.]

Cohen points out that movie theaters' seemingly perverse pricing mechanism is also used in a few other branches of the entertainment business:

The record industry doesn't appear to charge more for popular albums (except in the cutout bins, which are more analogous to low-cost second-run theaters). Similarly, video rentals all cost the same except for new releases vs. old.

Here is Cohen's attempt to explain movie studios' seeming lack of greed:

The best theory I have so far is signaling: By giving a film a low price, you let the world know it's lousy; then they really don't want to see it. So instead, everyone charges what the best films charge, hoping people will perceive the film as good.