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Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?
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A History Of Popcorn
Popped from a strain of corn which is starchy and a hard surface, popcorn was the first variant of maize that came from Central America thousands of years ago.
The sound of popping corn was entertaining, and by the 1950s, popped corn exploded, and was available in circuses and fairs.
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Popcorn: Banned At The Movie Theatre
Surprisingly, popcorn was not initially available at movie theatres, which were catering to a ‘highbrow clientele’ and didn’t want to spoil their expensive carpets and rugs.
They also thought that the crunchy sound of snacking on popcorn would distract the audience from the movies, which were mostly silent at that time.
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Popcorn: The Entry Into Movie Theatres
- When movie theatres started showing movies with sound, the audience increased, as now people didn’t have to read the titles from the movies.
- Popcorn by then was a cheap snack outside of theatres, with a bag costing only about 5 to 10 cents.
- Moviegoers started buying them before entering the theatres, forcing the owners to halt this practice and restrict the entry of the snack in the theatre.
- Eventually, the theatre owners realized they could sell popcorn inside the theatres and earn huge profits.
- Many theatres were saved from going bankrupt solely on the ability to sell the crunchy snacks along with movie tickets.
- By 1945, 50% of all popcorn that was consumed in the United States was eaten at the movie halls. The owners even used jingles and commercials to entice audiences to ‘go to the lobby’ during the movie interval.
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Popcorn Is Everything To Movies
Popcorn is admittedly sold at a huge markup in movies, as they make about 85 percent profits through its sales.
They are cheap to make at scale and are sold at prices that make them a primary profit machine for movie theatres.
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Popcorn When Television When Mainstream
Movie halls did amazingly well in the ’50s and the early 60s only to see a decline in ticket (and popcorn) sales due to something new in the market: The Television.
Popcorn machines started to make their way into households and while the sales were down, popcorn was now associated with movies, especially the yellow popcorn which expanded more and had the buttery-yellow tint.
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Modern Movie Experience
TV and other media eventually lived alongside the movie-going experience.
Popcorn is tied to movies as a ritualistic experience, and many luxury theatre owners provide gourmet-style popcorn to its patrons, along with other high-end snacks(with huge markups, of course) to make the movie-watching experience a complete one.
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The Horror Movie
Horror is a genre that has a reputation of being a low, somewhat trashy, titillating genre that appeals to our basest instincts.
"Its also a wonderful, popular art form through which...
For a work to be classified as horror...
... it has to have a monster, which has to be threatening in some way. The monster is often otherworldly or violates the laws of nature, as in Alien or Jaws—but some argue that a human character can be a monster, as in Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Halloween.
The monster generally is otherworldly or violates the laws of nature and is designed to elicit disgust as an emotion.
"The beast within"
This is the most popular theory explaining the genre’s popularity and it argues that an unconscious, repressed part of every human is actually savage; that the veneer of civility is very thin, and beneath that is essentially a monster.
Although we consciously disapprove of what the monster is doing, deep down part of us enjoys seeing the murder and mayhem the monster unleashes—because if we could, we would do that.
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The word "blockbuster" has wartime origins
The word first appeared in the pages of TIME. It was an article on the Allied bombing of key industrial targets in Italy. The bombs used were called blockbusters because of their a...
The word "blockbuster" changes meaning
In the pages of TIME, blockbuster was used to describe surprising news. In 1943, TIME used the word to describe a movie. The critics called the film adaptation of Mission to Moscow "as explosive as a blockbuster."
Not long after, the word started to refer specifically to movies that were commercially successful. The word became associated primarily with popular entertainment in general and with the big-budget, high-impact Hollywood hits.
Blockbuster refers to summer action movies
Eventually, the idea of a blockbuster movie became associated with summer action movies, especially after Steven Spielberg's thriller, Jaws, released in the summer of 1975.
When Star Wars came out two years later, blockbuster became a synonym for the summer blockbuster genre.
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Drive-In Theaters
The first Drive-In Theater was opened on June 6, 1933, by Richard Hollingshead, who was a car and movies enthusiast. This was located in Camden, New Jersey and cost 25 cents per person, plus 25 cen...
Drive-In Theaters: Evolution of Sound
The sound quality was an issue in the early days, with the sound system producing low voice for the cars on the back, and too much noise for the neighbours.
This early technology was called ‘directional sound’ and was replaced by the in-car speakers later.
The Largest Drive-In Theatre
The largest drive-in theatre was in Copiague, New York, known as the All-Weather Drive-In.
It had space for 2,500 cars plus an indoor viewing area of 1,200 seats along with a kid’s playground, shuttle trains and a restaurant.