I used to go to the cinema regularly with my wife, but the quality of films has sunken so low of late that we've actually walked out of 3 films in the last 2 years, so we hardly go any more. It has to be something really special.

If a film is naff on TV, you can turn over to another channel. If you are watching it on streaming, meh, chose something else. I've you've forked out the best part of 40€ for tickets, food, parking and fuel, you feel cheated.

Every time I've tried to post on here, someone's always interrupted me.

Same bugbears as everyone else.

Cost - more expensive for missus and I to go out to the cinema (if we buy snacks) than if we go out for a reasonable meal.
Snacks - I avoid certain cinemas because of the quality of food - stale popcorn and dodgy tasting nachos put me off.
Parking - luckily we have Star City which has free parking (although it can be a nightmare in the evenings). Otherwise you have to factor in the cost of parking.
Screen room - some places I've been to have dodgy seats and sticky floors. My biggest bugbear about this is that the emergency lighting in a small screen room can be bright enough to disrupt the enjoyment of the film.
Tickets - I like buying tickets from a machine where you can select your seats. What I hate are people sitting in your seats, and not being able to select a certain seat. I had this problem at Vue cinema where it gave me two seats next to the aisle, with a seat spare and then two seats booked by someone else. If I selected anywhere else, it kept coming up with errors and when I chose the original seats it had selected, it stated I couldn't leave a gap!

I used to love going to AMC cinema but discovered it fairly late. It validated your parking for the first three hours. The seats were comfortable. The food was excellent and the screens were good. It got taken over by Odeon but it isn't as good for some reason. Still better than most others incl cineworld.

I have a question for you all:

Why do you feel you have to eat at the cinema? On the rare occasions I go I can quite happily sit for a couple of hours without eating or drinking anything.

Is it because you're hungry or feel it's the 'done thing' to do?

I suppose it's part of the experience, and as others have said, one that can be a bit of a let down.
There aren't many places you go where you can get a drink the size of your head (not that that's a good idea for watching a film right enough) and a bucket of popcorn

Well I don't do fizzy drinks so that's never appealed to me. Popcorn is OK but not something I feel I have to eat (flavoured cardboard anyone?). You say it's part of the experience but that's only because you have made it that way. You're all moaning the food is over priced and awful yet you're still buying it. I'd rather go out for a decent meal afterwards myself.

The snacks are to get you through the trailers, often.

But yeah, how often do you actually put ice in your drink or eat popcorn that tastes quite like that in the cinema (sometimes in the bad sense)?

For a lot of people it's the old, 'I'm here anyway...'.

I think munching on food at the cinema is something I've accommodated over time. Initially, we would eat and then go to the cinema. Then later we started taking our own food into the cinema. This stuck and I used to buy sweets and popcorn and drink. Then I was introduced to nachos at the cinema and that had me hooked.

Popcorn can vary and at times can be fresh. Nachos I've learnt to order from only one cinema.

And I munch through films. Not just trailers. Albeit very quietly.

The biggest obstacle to getting me into a cinema is the poor quality of the films.

I'll take good story telling and a decent script every time over eye-candy on the screen. These days I'm far more interested in good TV shows where they can spend weeks if not years on plot lines and character development and not have to try and cram everything into 90 or so minutes.

I'd also ban all food and drink in the cinema. You don't need it. I never eat or drink while I'm actually WATCHING TV at home so why should the cinema be any different? TBH this is mostly down to a bad experience in New York when I went to see "Serenity" on it's opening night. There was a hideous aroma of stale popcorn from the moment I entered the foyer. I was feeling more than a little nauseous before we'd even got to the end of the trailers. All-in-all an experience that has left me totally disgusted by even the idea of popcorn.

Also I'm still not convinced about the quality of the sound systems in most cinemas. Unless you are sat in the sweet-spot the "surround" sound is still very directional, and the oppressive volume (some films I've been to see seemed louder than most rock concerts) means that for me much of the dialog is unintelligible.

I like the experience of going to see a film - I just don't like all the other crap that goes with it. In the 80s there were two good art house cinemas here in Nottingham showing a wide range of films. There would normally be at least one film worth going to see every week if not more and it was a great experience. Affordable. You went in got printed notes about the film, watched it and then went to the pub afterwards if you wanted to eat and snack. That's how I like it.

I think it's like pubs these days; the owners do all the hard work while the breweries and the government take the lion's share of the profits. There's no balance at all between the cinema customer's experience and the cost of it because the cinema is reliant on too many greedy fcukers itself just to stay open.

I was just thinking, can you imagine the state the cinemas would be in without Marvel right now?

Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimenson being boycotted by US cinemas | Den of Geek
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/paranor ... us-cinemas

You can see why the cinemas are pissed. Nobody buying the popcorn and bringing their friends, nobody watching the trailers or seeing the posters for other films, word of mouth...

Never even heard of the "franchise".

So I'm hearing the major issue being films themselves. Which I think is unfair. There are plenty of great films about if you look past what everybody else is watching. Sicario is the latest example.

I like the idea of popcorn. Is it necessary? No. But I enjoy it. Nachos are ridiculous. They belong in a restaurant.

But also, a lot of you are fed up with multiplexes. Are there no decent independent cinemas in the rest of the country?

How many of you are planning to make the trip for Spectre in a week? Or Star Wars? Are they enough to get you into a cinema?

Same franchise horror story as ever - the first one was made for 50p and becomes an unexpected hit. They then drain money from the sort of young idiots who lap this sh1t up. Well, until even they catch on. By then you've got an entire series that can be sold multiple times over on the goodwill of the first film. All are made for peanuts and you sell t-shirts and action figures even when the original series has ended. Until the inevitable reboot.

The key with horror is to do it cheap. You'll never lose money and by accident you can wind up with Freddy, Jason, Jigsaw, Candyman, Leatherface...

The issue IME is the cost of watching a thriller, say - it's a lot of money just to watch a film on a big screen that doesn't really benfit from it. The vast majority will do that at home if they even know the film exists at all.

Independent cinemas are few and far between here at least, and they simply can't afford to upgrade I'd guess. My local one is still like something from the 70s. No kid's gonna wanna go there after seeing a multiplex. I don't really care about such things but I still think, 'Hmm, not risking it'.

What's key about actually going to the cinema now... Well, how often do you actually buy music, even downloads? Once you're out of the habit you're not likely to return. And if you're not going for the thrillers or even comedies, you're left with some godawful action films, usually. If parents aren't going for themselves, the kids probably aren't either. Short of summer. A ticket, parking, snacks... That adds up for two people, with a family you're talking the sort of money that would go towards a holiday in total.

The studios don't help by basically season-zoning their releases, though that's getting a bit better now.

The issue for me with cinemas is that they are increasingly trying to fight against TV by becoming more like it without realising that TV was never really cinema's main rival. Cinemas simply cannot compete with TV or on-Demand services on their turf. Cinemas are not instant, convenient or private and will always lose if they try to fight on those terms.

IMO, cinema's main rival is actually live theatre in all its forms - music concerts, musicals, plays, stand-up comedy, live sport. Think about it. All of those other forms:

• advertise months in advance
• are communal activities
• take place at gathered, public locations
• are of inherently restricted supply
• are marketed based on the idea of a spectacle that cannot be reproduced by watching a recording at home
• cannot be paused

People flock in droves to sit in the cold outside Somerset House to watch old films on a crap screen with worse sound. During the London Olympics, thousands of people physically moved to watch running-about-knees-bent behaviour that they would have ignored on the TV. Why? Because it's special. Because it's hard, not easy. Because they can say "I was there".

Every film contains several stories. There's the obvious one that is the subject of the film. Then there's the story of how the film got made. But there are also the stories of the people who went to watch it. Going out to share my watching demands a price from me and the others around me. I pay that price when I feel I have a reasonable prospect of getting some benefit from it. The benefits are the experience of the film and having a story to tell - a story that is uniquely mine.

I have stories of when I went to watch Peter Pan as a child, or when my dad took me to watch Jurassic Park not long before he died.

But until the film industry gives cinema-goers stories that are special, communal and worth telling later on, the watchers might as well be at home jabbing at Netflix.