Cinema Economics: Box-Office Splits, Concessions & Screen Scheduling

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Measure every show of a Saturday by average ticket price and occupancy, then calculate the weighted figures for the whole day and count the weak shows.
• Calculate a film's weekly rental under a sliding-scale floor and a 90/10 split over the house nut, pay the greater of the two and work out the effective rental % over the whole run.
• Work out the gross profit of every concession item, the spend per patron and the concession profit per patron, and show how much of the cinema's gross profit comes from the snack bar.
• Turn opening times into an operating window, build a slot from runtime, ads and cleaning, fit whole shows into the day, find the start time of the last show and add up the screen minutes left idle.
• Measure each screen's capacity in seat-hours, compare it with the seat-hours sold, calculate the box office per seat-hour and find the screen that earns most from its capacity.
• Measure how much premium screens punch above their weight in the box office, then test a matinee price cut with an elasticity and count the concession profit it brings along.
• Measure each film's per-screen average and week-on-week drop, project next week, decide hold or drop against a threshold and chart the decay curves.
• Build a multiplex's annual P&L from a few drivers, calculate the contribution of one admission and turn the fixed costs into break-even admissions and the occupancy they need.