The Box Office is Everything: In Praise of the Window at the Front of the Theater

When I was in college I worked at a Dallas movie theater, the Inwood. It was an art house theater that mainly showed foreign films, independents, and some repertory titles. During my workdays there, most of the time I was working at the concession stand. But sometimes they'd put me in the box office. 

In case anybody very young is reading this, the box office is the place where the phrase "box office"—as in how "much money a movie made last week"—comes from. It's the boxy little booth at the front of the movie theater with a window where people trade money for tickets. 

The box office is the place where the hermetically sealed wonderland of the movie theater connects with the world outside. 

Removing that—along with marquees on the theater itself and out on the road leading to the theater—shifts movie theaters into the "out of sight, out of mind" category," which I think is ultimately bad for business. 

I get why most movie theaters thought it was a good idea to close their box offices. In order to have a functioning box office, you have to put a person in it, and that's an employee who could be working inside, probably at the concession stand, where a lot of theaters have enabled ticket sales (which means you can buy a ticket and then get popcorn and a soda).

Plus, people usually order tickets online now, and most theater chains let you choose where you sit in advance, and it's more time consuming to deal with that at a box office window, and a little bit more stressful, because there might be people lining up behind you while you try to figure out which row you want to sit in. 

Probably these chains think of physical box offices as vestigial appendages of another time. But this is short-term thinking. 

Bringing back staffed box offices, combined with functioning marquees both on the theater itself and roads leading to the theater, amounts to a coded form of marketing or advertising. It says, "This is a movie theater. There are movies here, and the titles are listed right where you can see them." 

People might still go to the movies on impulse, if they have the opportunity, and they are more likely to just suddenly decide to see a movie if (1) they can see what's playing at the movie theater and (2) there's a person right in front of them, and they can walk right up to them and buy a ticket from them.

This person can also answer questions about the (potential) moviegoing experience, like, "What's this movie about?" or "Is this movie appropriate for my child?" or "Which of the movies playing at this theater is your favorite?" I used to answer these questions and others all the time when worked inside of a box office. My job as the box office person wasn't just to take money and hand back change plus a ticket. It was to sell people on the idea of going to see a movie. I enjoyed it. It was one of the most enjoyable parts of working in a theater, actually. There were times when I'd even tell potential customers, in all sincerity, "I've seen this movie three times, and I can pretty much promise you that you're going to enjoy it." 

If they didn't enjoy it, I'd give them a refund. Movie theaters give refunds for almost any reason! (I thought I'd put that out there, in case you didn't already know it.)

There are a lot of factors that explain why movie theaters have struggled post-pandemic. But I think it would be an error to downplay one very subtle but insidious one: the physical space that is the movie theater has become psychologically cut off from the rest of the world; from pedestrian life, or whatever version of it exists in suburbs or malls; and from the reality that people buy stuff on impulse. 

I think theaters are leaving money on the table by not having functioning box offices plus physical signage that tells the public "There is a movie theater here" and "Here is a list of the movies you can see here" and offering them an opportunity to buy a ticket without going through the hassle of opening up their phones and searching for the name of the movie theater and then searching for the name of the movie and seeing what the showtimes are and...I am getting tired even TYPING all of that. Why would anyone out in the wild go through the hassle? 

They wouldn't. They'd just keep walking.

So why not make things easy on them? 

The tools are already in place.

Right now, with some rare exceptions, the only people who go into a movie theater are people who made the decision to go into a movie theater hours or days earlier. The industry, in the name of convenience and profitability, has trained people out of moviegoing, except as a predetermined act. A huge swath of potential customers is now being excluded from the possibility of spontaneously deciding to go to THE MOVIES, as opposed to a specific movie.  

There's a theater at a mall in my town, the NorthPark, that still staffs its box office windows. People can buy tickets at the box office and then go over to an employee stationed at the base of the escalator leading upstairs to the multiplex who scans their ticket and says "Theater five, on your left," or whatever. 

I see people walking up to the NorthPark box office and making chit-chat with employees every time I'm at the mall. A lot of the time these people walk away with tickets and go upstairs. 

If there was no box office, the theater wouldn't have made that money. And if there was no marquee, they might not have thought to approach the box office, inclined to see a movie and just needing a nudge.