Demand for Movie Ads

(Photo: Sarah_Ackerman)

The hit movie of a few weeks ago was Breaking Dawn Part 2, which several of my grandkids saw on opening night.  A grandson reports that at the first showing there was a full 30 minutes of advertisements before the movie, more than he’d ever seen. He figured correctly that the captive audience (people lined up for hours to see the first showing) would fill the theater immediately, implicitly increasing the demand for advertisements.  That made the advertising time more valuable, so the theater responded by offering more ads. I would bet too that they charged the advertisers more per minute for the right to show their ads—implicitly thus increasing price as well as quantity.  (HT to SCH)