Broken Business Models - How are they still making money?

[Judge Dredd]

As the title says, complain or be perplexed by broken business models.

A couple of recent ones got me to make this thread. First is the cinema.

For me, it's the ridiculous prices. £12 or more to see a movie. This might be justifiable if the movies were good, but often times they aren't. What's more, supposedly just buying a ticket doesn't profit the cinema. They make their money on overpriced concessions. Most people I know sneak in a small bottle of coke, but then there's one friend that can spend close to £60 just seeing a movie with some snacks. Insane. And if that's not enough, they play ads before the movie. Fortunately, this isn't as bad as it used to be, at least where I live. Fuck, they even attempt to sell a movie subscription that offers little value.

Then there's the quality of the movies. I don't know who dictates what's shown and for how long, but it's wild to me that movies like Exit 8, Iron Lung, TADC, and Backrooms are "blink and you'll miss it" affairs (if they're shown at all) despite selling to packed houses. Meanwhile junk like Mango and Grogu or whatever the latest slop Marvel puts out will plays every half hour for a month or two despite playing to empty seats. Then there's classic movies, or rather, the lack of them. With the exception of things like the Akira 4k re-release or some seniors only showing of Saving Private Ryan, they don't show classics. Imagine showing Aliens Directors Cut, Indiana Jones, or Independence Day. Movies that benefit from the big screen and big sound.

James Rofle already made a video about this that goes into autistic detail if you want more.

I don't run a cinema, but the solution seems obvious to me. Lower the ticket price. Make concessions (especially drinks) competitively priced so people aren't incentivized to sneak stuff in. Play movies people actually want to see.


I didn't expect to rant so much, so here's a short one.
"I want to [ride public transport/see a concert/attend a con]."
"Buy tickets at the ticket booth."
"The ticket booth is shut."
"Then use the website."
"The website is broken."
Optional: Act surprised and blame younger generations when revenue drops like a rock.

 

[Pastry Man]

How are they still making money?

Money laundering?

In the case of the movie industry, but not the theaters themselves: Hollywood accounting.

 

[PeachDream]

Obligatory: Bars - Pay 4x markup for a shot of mid liquor and then be expected to tip 20% for the privilege. Bonus if it's too dark to see and too loud to actually talk to anyone, despite not actually being a club.

 

[Fascist Kirk]

it comes down to wallstreet banks willing to lever bets on trading stocks. AMC has not filled a theater or made a profit in 20 years, but Moon bro Millennials with a We bull or Robin account will Keep that shit business for ever . . . .

 

[Cucktry Roads]

I fucking hate theaters so much. The big thing with covid that I loved was all the movies were going straight to streaming (pirating) right away, so didn't have to pay for the movie ticket and sit in a nasty ass theater for a couple hours. But after covid, everything returned to theaters.

 

[PeachDream]

it comes down to wallstreet banks willing to lever bets on trading stocks. AMC has not filled a theater or made a profit in 20 years, but Moon bro Millennials with a We bull or Robin account will Keep that shit business for ever . . . .

That's not quite how that works lol

Also private equity tends to absolutely kill companies they buy out half the time.

 

[Beelzebub's Lawyer]

I don't know who dictates what's shown and for how long

The issue with what's being shown is that for decades, Hollywood dominated the movie scene and a lot of theaters still think that showing Hollywood movies will bring the money.
Now however, especially this year, we are witnessing a big change.
Iron Lung, Obsession and Backrooms are Youtuber movies and they are destroying Hollywood crap.

I think that, if this continues for another year or 2, theaters will notice and will stop making bad deals with Disney or Paramount because time after time, their movies fail to bring in audiences.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

Money laundering?

In the case of the movie industry, but not the theaters themselves: Hollywood accounting.

the ones that are surviving play older classics on top of modern slop. but in general theatres arent making profits.

Obligatory: Bars - Pay 4x markup for a shot of mid liquor and then be expected to tip 20% for the privilege. Bonus if it's too dark to see and too loud to actually talk to anyone, despite not actually being a club.

youre supposed to try and get laid.

 

[Decapitated Nigger Baby]

Car industry is fucked due to operating costs, china existing and the EV debacle
Fintech is fucked due to competition
Cable TV is fucked due to internet being a thing and decades of debt accrual
Casino resorts are fucked, too long of a story to explain in here
Food brands are fucked due to private labels and inflation
Chinese retailers are fucked due to price wars
Prediction markets will be regulated into a grave sooner or later
Shoe brands are fucked due to competition
90% of pharma and biotech companies are fucked due to patent expiry
95% of tech companies are fucked because it's tech

 

[Veliky]

How are they still making money?

Most theaters don't, actually. They've never fully recovered from the lockdowns and that's why shit like AMC was a meme stock on par with Gamestop a couple years ago, the business model just stopped working for a large part of them and they're just surviving because almost all theaters are located in prime real estate/commercial space which on paper is worth a lot and let's them borrow huge amounts of money.

Then there's the quality of the movies. I don't know who dictates what's shown and for how long, but it's wild to me that movies like Exit 8, Iron Lung, TADC, and Backrooms are "blink and you'll miss it" affairs (if they're shown at all) despite selling to packed houses. Meanwhile junk like Mango and Grogu or whatever the latest slop Marvel puts out will plays every half hour for a month or two despite playing to empty seats.

Theaters are contractually obligated to by the studios, that's why. For example let's say you want Disney to give you a better cut of the ticket price when it comes to screenings of Toy Story 5, in many cases that's gonna be bundled in with also forcing you to have screenings of shit like Mando and Grogu for a long time no matter how empty the room is, and there's even times where if you don't play ball with those terms the studios will only let you show the movie in a couple hundred of screens while your competition gets the full release.

 

[Leylon Sneed]

While I have thoughts on the theater industry, I think that's pretty well covered, but how is computer repair still a thing? I know a handful of shops who do phone repairs, because they have a wholesaler in Thailand so they can get screens for a couple bucks a piece, but don't have any equipment or knowledge of how to work on a PC. How do they afford the lease?

 

[Absolutego]

Financialization in general. I think the cultural memes surrounding the stock market has destroyed thousands of good businesses and empowered almost the same amount of frauds.

It was originally very communal - a way for multiple people to pool risk for greater reward. As that investment+dividends model proved wildly successful, the ancillary games being played around the day to day trades of stocks, and that has wildly spiraled out of control. The largest publicly traded companies don't focus on delivering a great product, being successful, and paying out dividends to their shareholders, they instead care about appeasing a cadre of mega-investors who care about the stock price over all else. They complain about dividends, saying it's detracting from the price of the stock! The price is fundamentally an agreed-upon mass hallucination, it's no direct indicator of value. Dividends do demonstrate value! It's pure profit distributed to shareholders!

You have companies rise to the top based off of media hype with fundamentally unsound, unsustainable business models, who exist to generate their founders a payday with the IPO and never sniff profitability again. It's happening with increasing frequency. WeWork, Theranos, Peloton, Beyond Meat, shit don't even get me started on SPAC over IPO and how much that's just a blueprint for conmen to scam retarded investors. And you have the other side of it, where instead of the stock market being the dumping ground for founders to extract wealth, private equity uses traded companies as a dumping ground of their own debts to either destroy the business via bankruptcy or so fundamentally destroy its reputation that, after a few well-placed articles in the WSJ tick up the stock price right around the time the equity firm indicated they'd sell, they cash out and leave the business to languish and die.

It's all too divorced from the human-to-human interaction that made investing so powerful. The incentives are backwards. Practicing what you get taught in economics 101 when it comes to being a publicly traded company means you will get mauled by the gamba-addicted sharks that make up most of the industry.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Most of the time the answer is either government money, boomers/ebt or having other methods of income to payback for losses (like Disney breaking even despite seemingly bombing every second film).

I'll put into the ring Advertising and Big Data (which usually come together). Advertising in the cases where companies are mainly paying for bots or for a product that is so well known that you wonder what type of people will decide the Nth time they see the ad to buy in.

Big Data is just useless most of the time unless it's something very specific like selling your car speedometer data to insurers, but the idea of using big data for targeted ads would probably work with a fraction of the data used.

 

[Leylon Sneed]

good businesses

Don't go public. If you have a solid model you don't offer shares on the public market.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Car industry is fucked due to operating costs, china existing and the EV debacle

And the Chinese car industry itself is a massive bubble of fuckery that could collapse in possibly more catastrophic levels than Evergrande:

• The mass subsidies by the CCP for EVs has led to hundreds of companies jumping on the bandwagon, in the usual bughive fashion whenever a get rich quick scheme comes up.
• The massive Gold Rush it generated has led to China having WAY too much capacity and not enough buyers.
• Chinese automakers are attempting to dump their shitty ass EVs to try to ease that underutilization and to try to kill off foreign competition, but it's to be seen if people will take the bait and buy enough of them.
• The cars themselves are cheap copycats of Tesla, and they all rip off each other too.
• The cars themselves are of shitty quality, with the stuff you don't see being extremely cheaply made.
• They love to catch on fire, and those fires have caused numerous loss of life.
• The massive competition in the industry has led to massive price wars, narrowing the already tiny profit margins even further, and leading to even more quality drops.
• The development cycles of Chinese cars are extremely rushed, as it seems like there's hundreds of new models or new refreshes coming out every year.
• The said rapid development cycles also contributes to the massive depreciation with Chinese cars, and also brings the issue of whether automakers will continue to make spare parts available when the so many new models make older ones "obsolete".
• China has reduced EV subsidies at the start of 2026, which worsens the said already tiny profit margins and will lead to even more price wars, cost cutting, and trying to dump those shitty ass cars on foreign nations.

The video game industry is also reaching extreme levels of fucked. Game companies like Sony are STILL trying to go after the Live Service Gold Rush, even when Live Service Giants like Fortnite are running into issues. (Epic Games laying off 1000 staff) Video games take longer and longer to make, budgets are skyrocketing, and games that very few people want are still being made. And even if it's a game that people do want, those games end up releasing in very buggy states and take years to fix, or they'll never get fixed.

 

[Audit]

youre supposed to try and get laid.

It was a better business model before the dawn of diversity and bars getting taken over by middle aged persons. Might as well get a bar that boots anyone over the age of 35 or fails the palette test if you want the youth dollars. The successful bars I know of nowadays cater to friend groups over the age of 30. Trivia hour, happy hour, etc. exist to attract customers who are coming for general socialization and not sex.

 

[pro drivor]

Here ya go boss. Ever wonder why American cars are so shit nowadays? It wasn't always like this.

https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/gm-how-the-giant-lost-its-voice-an-insiders-perspective/

 

[Judge Dredd]

Shoe brands are fucked due to competition

Shoe shops that sell trainers for £300 a pair. No one is ever in these places. I'm told the answer is, once again, money laundering. What isn't a money laundering front these days.
Edit: fixed typo.

Casino resorts are fucked, too long of a story to explain in here

Fintech is fucked due to competition

I'd like to know more.

Car industry is fucked due to operating costs, china existing and the EV debacle

The car industry has a lot going on. Others already mentioned Chine and the Tesla-fiction of cars. Another major sticking point is EU regulations. I've seen that blamed on why a cheap, reliable, efficient car for the masses doesn't exist.

Theaters are contractually obligated to by the studios, that's why. For example let's say you want Disney to give you a better cut of the ticket price when it comes to screenings of Toy Story 5, in many cases that's gonna be bundled in with also forcing you to have screenings of shit like Mando and Grogu for a long time no matter how empty the room is, and there's even times where if you don't play ball with those terms the studios will only let you show the movie in a couple hundred of screens while your competition gets the full release.

I thought "block booking" was a thing of the past.

Most theaters don't, actually. They've never fully recovered from the lockdowns and that's why shit like AMC was a meme stock on par with Gamestop a couple years ago, the business model just stopped working for a large part of them and they're just surviving because almost all theaters are located in prime real estate/commercial space which on paper is worth a lot and let's them borrow huge amounts of money.

This is something I could go on about. Not lowering rents/house prices. I remember this being a thing after 2008 housing crash. Boomers who had spent 200k on a house that was now worth 80k, instead of eating the 120k loss, just left it on the market forever at 200k.

I say this because it supposedly effects rent too. Empty business units and even some homes asking insane rents, but refuse to lower it. Turns out investors refuse to lower rents because doing so makes the property worth less on paper.

investing

More people need to hear the speech from Other People's Money.

 

[rel=alternate]

Paper news.

Resellers basically use it as a lead product to attract traffic hoping they buy something else at higher markup.

Publishers don't make money and are just sustained because they are owned by billionaires with interest in manipulating public opinion.

 

[Butterschmalz]

Goy money.