Drifting Away from Movie Theatres

Since moving to Japan, I’ve hardly seen any movies at theatres. Going to theatres happened more often in my first couple of years when I was still in Aichi, where most of my language school friends were because that’s what students do, right? Karaoke, movie, picnic, sports, repeat.

But to be honest, even when I was Singapore, I wasn’t such a huge movie fan. However, trips to the cinema grew even less when I started working at a post-production company doing broadcasting compliance. Because my work revolved around watching TV 8-12 hours a day, every day of the week, watching movies were no longer much of a break for me. In fact, the job caused me to be unable to enjoy movies as my reflex was to pause the show when I see or hear something non-compliant to regional broadcasting standards.

Regardless, the biggest reason for my very few trips to the theatre is because of the price here in Japan. Granted, depending on the day, time, and region, there are some discounts to movie tickets where you can get tickets for just 1,000 yen. Yes, you heard me: just 1,000 yen, because regular tickets are 1,800 yen. That’s about SGD$22 per movie, and I don’t find it worthwhile to pay that much for movies since I grew up in a country where $10 is more than enough for a show. While I have the privilege of being able to catch countless Japanese films not released overseas now, I do not get to see several Hollywood shows not on screen here. And those that are released here are mostly released some 2-3 months later than the rest of the world. That resulted in me going to the cinema probably only about once every two years now. And because I don’t catch movies alone, as long as people don’t ask me along, I don’t think I will be there again anytime soon.

The good news is, I still keep myself a little bit updated with the latest shows whenever I fly, so I see no reason to go to the cinema as I can catch lots of shows in-flight. That is also one reason Singapore Airlines is awesome.

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