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

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.”