In the ICU

Depending on who’s talking, the latest edition of the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) was either a big success or a death knell for the inexorable decline of the Philippine movie industry.

Intrigued by the controversy, I planned to watch a movie in a cinema for the first time in ages. The MMFF is over, but I thought a movie with top-of-the-line special effects would be worth watching on the big screen.

Last Saturday, I went to a cinema complex in a shopping mall near my home and checked out the ticket prices for the latest installment of the monster hit “Avatar” franchise – “Fire and Ash.”

While I knew cinema ticket prices had surged over the years, I was still dismayed to find out that the “Avatar” tickets were priced at P500 for regular and P600 for premium seats.

Basic Netflix subscription is lower than P500 for an entire month. And you can pause the movie for toilet or coffee breaks anytime, or answer your cellphone, without missing any part of the film.

Fans of “Avatar” include upper income folks, so there could be enough people willing to fork out even more than P600 to watch a movie with a running time of three hours and 15 minutes. (I’m not upper income; I backed out.)

But what about less popular movies?

Philippine movies are generally geared toward the masses, including those for whom P500 can buy Noche Buena for the entire family (as estimated by the government). But cinema ticket prices are for the middle and upper income classes, many of whom aren’t interested in watching Philippine movies. As for the uber rich, they have home theater systems in their mansions.

If the government and industry players want to rescue Philippine movies from the ICU, perhaps someone can try putting up cinemas that cater to the masses.

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No need to reinvent the wheel. Those with the means to build moviehouses (or retrofit existing ones) can offer the old theater formats in terms of seating, accommodating more people at cheaper prices.

In my youth, people could enter cinemas anytime, even near the end of the movie. People staying the whole day inside the theater was no problem (although there were such cases), since even the seats in the premium loge section weren’t comfortable like the current ones, so most people weren’t keen on watching the same movie twice.

The blockbusters had people sitting even on the aisle stairs and standing cheek by jowl in the back aisle – literally standing room only.

There was no limit to the number of people who could be allowed in; the more people, the better for the bottom line of both the film producer and theater owner. Popcorn and drinks were optional; the cost was not tacked on to the ticket.

During the annual film festival, huge crowds lined the route of the parade of stars in downtown Manila where the top theaters were located. The film fest in those days was truly a “people’s festival.”

My mother and other relatives were in the film industry, and I developed a love for movies at a young age. I no longer remember how much the theater tickets were at the time, but they must have been cheap, because even with my meager school allowance, I could afford to buy theater tickets to watch movies alone.

Today, the director of the top grosser in the MMFF himself has lamented steep movie ticket costs.

“By pricing the ordinary Filipino out of the theater, the industry hasn’t just lost customers, it has lost its soul. Cinema has shifted from a shared national culture to a middle-class privilege,” filmmaker Jun Robles Lana posted online.

Lana directed “Call Me Mother” starring Vice Ganda, which reportedly led the eight entries in the recent Metro film fest in gross sales.

The MMFF kicked off on Dec. 19, with screenings extended to Jan. 10 to 17. Seven of the eight entries reportedly enjoyed eight-figure gross sales, but industry watchers said the combined total was still P100 million lower than the earnings in the previous year’s film fest.

With ticket prices ranging from P360 to P670 in Metro Manila, and from P295 and up in the provinces, how can the masses afford watching movies in theaters?

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Theater owners must also consider their competition.

I stopped watching movies in theaters long before the pandemic. This was because of the arrival in the 1990s of VHS – the analog video home system.

The VHS format was supplanted by VCDs or video compact discs, which in turn were quickly replaced by the DVD and finally the high-definition Blu-ray.

Blu-ray movies were cinema quality in both video and audio, with most having subtitles. And with huge, hi-def TV screens becoming available, the appeal of watching movies on the big screen was eroded. The sound in cavernous theaters obviously can’t be topped by home movie systems. But the audio that I can control actually adds to the appeal of home movies for me because I like to keep the volume down to protect my ears.

Because I keep the volume quite low, I need subtitles – something you don’t normally get in the cinemas, unless the original audio is in a language other than Filipino or English.                   

Subtitles allowed K-drama to go global and dominate streaming platforms. I was introduced to Hallyu during the pandemic lockdowns, and it was delightful to discover how relatable and well-crafted Korean movies and TV series were, with masterful storytelling.

Hallyuwood has become a global phenomenon, along with K-pop. South Korean cinema artistry first received international validation when the 100-percent Korean language movie “Parasite” romped away with the 2020 Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film.

If theater owners and Philippine film producers won’t budge on the ticket prices, they better make sure the local movies are worth paying P500 for, and aren’t just tired, formulaic rehashes of the hits of the past.