The ticket cost doesn't bother me too much, only because the theaters have to pay huge sums of money for licensing the movie and customers who don't like the movie can't get a refund.
Do people really believe reviews and go anyway or do they see what they want despite others seeing it? I've never cared if movie X raked in Y number of tickets sold in Z period of time. It's a false equivalence, often proved by people bickering about what they didn't like about it.
I agree with Push The Button above, the bar is high for seeing a flick and if the best the flick can do is to carbon copy Star Wars A New Hope, all the whiz-bang thrown in isn't going to be as exciting, especially if the plot becomes so predictable -- yes, we know they had to play it safe. The fact Han has to go "Another death star?" (in other words, breaking the fourth wall but not grinning the way Stanley Roper would, only shows the writers are insulting the audience and possibly laughing while doing so. Then again, I don't know everything that goes on behind the scenes so it's unfair to the writers to say that.)
Imax can be cool, but it can become overwhelming. The cost makes sense given the time and effort to make the specialized films.
"Annoying people" - it's funny we're in a society that lets moviegoers be antisocial since everyone blames the ushers trying to remind everyone to be quiet for the consideration of all in the room for causing any ruckus. Assuming theaters still hire such jobs, apparently people pay attention to the big projected sign that reminds them of what they don't do with their cellphones, etc, after (literally) 20 minutes of previews and big diamond rings and cars they're never going to care about. But raise the price of foodstuffs 5x and the previews and adverts aren't needed. Or movie leasing costs can come down but is that ever going to happen?
Yet Jax's point is equally good, Hollywood is indeed relying more on hollow spectacle and whiz-bang, and the CGI rendering costs are not cheap. There has been a shift in how movies are made with content and pacing, relying more on rapid pacing and special effects to try to cover up (an increased amount of) plot imperfections. Which is reasonable to an extent, the time involved to write and fix scripts can be considerable and there's not been a bulletproof script in decades, if ever. But now it does feel almost like laziness. And while the industry has always put out classics and clunkers, these days it does feel as if everything has to be ramped up.
