The Movie Theater Dilemma

The Movie Theater Dilemma
By Daniel Rothman

It started out like any other Sunday. Sleeping late, playing Call of Duty, watching football. As I lay there, watching the Eagles and Giants fight in a pivotal playoff game, an idea came to me. Why don’t I go to the movies? It didn’t take long to convince the rest of my family that I had a good idea, especially in the height of Oscar season, when studios release all of the best movies. There were many films out that I’d heard were fantastic, from Slumdog Millionare to Frost/Nixon.
The problem arose as I looked through the newspaper’s movie times. The first thing I noticed was that half the movies I wanted to see weren’t even playing. Oscar-bait such as Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Reader seemed to have skipped Iowa City (although I considered the idea that the theaters might just hate Kate Winslett). The only way I could see any of those was to go all the way to Cedar Rapids, a time-consuming journey made impossible by the daunting pile of undone homework in my room. While junky films like Paul Blart have their place (and trust me, I love these movies), the theaters have more than enough screens to also play higher quality films.
Fine. I figured I’ll just see one of the other movies playing here. I mean, between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Gran Torino, Milk, or even Marley & Me, at least one had to be playing at a convenient time, right? Wrong. There are two movie theaters in this town, and both were playing the same movies within five minutes of each other. Every single one played around 1:00 and 4:30, making it nearly impossible to see a movie. There’s no way I was skipping lunch to go to the 1:00 show, and even less of a chance of me going to the 4:30, which would make having a nice dinner very difficult. When the same company owns both the Coral Ridge and Sycamore theaters, shouldn’t they coordinate the times so that there are alternating shows? That way there would always be a good movie showing, and crises like mine could be avoided. Iowa City isn’t so big that people can’t travel across town to see a movie. By providing a more efficient movie schedule, the owners could maximize viewing opportunities and increase attendence. Nothing would make my Sundays better than being able to sleep late, go to a 2:30 movie, and still catch Sunday Night Football. If only the theaters felt this way too.