I love the cinema

On the 4th of January this year I bought a cinema ticket.

This cinema ticket was something different, not quite Wonka’s Golden Ticket (it didn’t come with a Scrumdiddlyumptious chocolate bar. It’s not gold. In fact, it doesn’t even exist on the material plane - it’s digital! (Does code have weight?))

I bought myself an annual pass for the cinema! I was intending to do this later in the year once a Big Change had happened, but in early January, I decided that I didn’t want to wait.

I’m so glad I didn’t wait! I haven’t been to the cinema so frequently in my life. On the weekend I bought it, I saw two movies on Saturday (The Wild Robot and We Live in Time) and I saw two movies on Sunday (Paddington in Peru and Gladiator 2).

I might not have seen any of these in the cinema and due to buying this cinema pass, there I was! The lights going down and my eyes lighting up!

The annual pass cost me £158, which works out at £13.10 a month (I did that maths - you’re welcome). There was a January discount on the pass, so it was even cheaper than the normal £16.99 per month (£203.88)

Tickets for the cinema I go to are usually about £10, or £5 if you book online. As I said, this is a digital ticket (aka online), so let’s say that every movie would normally cost £5.

This means that I need to see at least two full movies and 62% of a third movie to get my money’s worth each month. I won’t go into average movie lengths or work out the time because let’s be frankly honest - no one cares (and my post-9pm maths on a Monday evening isn’t going to stretch that far.)

To make it simpler, let’s say I need to see at least three movies a month to get more than my money’s worth from this annual pass.

That’s 36 movies this year - my maths can definitely handle 3x12 (please, please calm yourselves down! What can I say, it’s a talent of mine.) Taking £158/36 works out at £4.33 per movie, so doing the sum a different way - £158/£5 gives 31.2 movies to watch a year, rounded up to 32 (because hopefully no movies I choose to see are so bad I only get 1/5th of the way through).

32 movies! 32 movies in a year to get my money’s worth from this annual pass.

Side note: I get a tiny kick out of working out things like this in relation to expensive things. When I bought my Nintendo Switch and Animal Crossing New Horizons, I would check the ‘hours played’ and let me tell you…I’ve definitely had my money’s worth from that. I think I’m at about 1000 hours on ACNH, not to mention the other easy 1000 hours on other games combined! Definitely worth buying.

Back to the cinema.

In January I saw 11 movies. That’s almost a third of my year’s movies already!

There are still four days left of February after today, and I’ve seen six movies so far. I’m not sure I’ll see any more this month - there isn’t much on that I haven’t already seen, and I’ve not seen anything that I’d immediately rewatch this month.

Backtracking to January - as I said, I saw We Live in Time on Saturday 4th, and went to see it again on Monday 6th with some lovely, dear friends (although this was at a different cinema so it doesn’t count towards my pass)! If that movie was still on at the cinema, I would go and see it again tomorrow. I loved it.

In total this year then, I’ve seen 17 movies using my annual pass. 17/32 works out at about 53% of the movies I need to see this year to make this purchase worth it. (psst - I know it’s already worth it).

How does the maths work out at this point? £158/17=£9.29 per movie so far. Cheaper than the other big cinema in town, and cheaper than if I didn’t book online. Good progress!

None of this so far really explains why I love the cinema. I alluded to it a little with this beautiful line from earlier:

The lights going down and my eyes lighting up!

Oof how poetic!

I love the cinema because I can put my phone on do not disturb and sit in the dark, getting immersed (as much the film allows) into a story. (In an ideal world everyone else would have their phones away too, but we live in 2025 and they are addictive and important tools, I understand and am not invulnerable to its’ power. Please put your phone away in the cinema though. Please!)

I love the cinema because it’s like popping out of the world for a couple of hours and into a completely different world or life. I’m not running from anything by going to the cinema, but sometimes I am running for the train after the cinema.

I love the cinema because this is how a movie is supposed to be watched. I don’t (yet) have a home cinema, so I can’t make the room pitch black, I don’t have a screen the size of a wide, flat house, and I don’t have a sound system that would annoy my neighbours every single day. One day I might!

So, so many people work on most movies, and it’s amazing to be able to watch the product of many, many hands and minds and hearts in the way it was meant to be seen.

It’s easy to forget this when most people in my little bubble are making beautiful art by themselves. It’s amazing that a story can be told with so many people involved, and it shows that when people work together, incredible things can be made. Sometimes, of course, movies aren’t fantastic and don’t quite land with me, but to someone else, Captain America Brave New World might be their favourite movie of all time! Harrison Ford as a giant Red Hulk smashing stuff up? COME ON! So exciting!

(On the flip side - We Live in Time might be a complete flop in some peoples’ eyes and hearts, but for me it was very beautiful and moving and charming and lovely!)

Having the ability to go to the cinema to see all sorts of movies that I might not have gone to if it wasn’t ‘free’ for me, means that I’m seeing more and more movies, and I’m getting some nice surprises! I definitely wouldn’t have gone to see Conclave because why do I care about who the next fictional pope is and how they are chosen? But it was interesting and fairly gripping, and I did enjoy it! I probably wouldn’t have seen Robbie Williams monkeying around as a coked-up chimp, but now I’ve seen that!

I’m so glad that the cinema exists, I’m so glad that I have found a renewed love for it, and that I made the decision to buy this annual pass. I’m looking forward to hitting and surpassing 32 movies. I’m looking forward to them ‘costing’ less than if I’d booked online. I’m looking forward to Mickey 17 and the Minecraft movie. I’m looking forward to 28 Years Later and Mission Impossible and Jurassic World and all the other movies coming out this year! I’m looking forward to buying the same cinema pass next year (unless they’ve closed and demolished the cinema by then (as the staff member I asked said: “It’s just rumours at the moment”))

My name is Sam and I love the cinema. Long live the cinema.

FIN.