Does Time Matter in Modelling Urban Leisure Trip Frequency? Evidence From Moviegoers

Models of movie theatre demand have tended to employ aggregate data and focus on price and income as key variables. Surprisingly, the effect of travel time and multiplexes has not, hitherto, been formally investigated. This study does so using national survey data. Following developments in the environmental economics literature, we present estimates of individual travel cost models for multiplex and nonmultiplex movie theatres. These results establish that travel time does have a significant negative effect on non-multiplex movie theatre trips but this does not hold for multiplex trips. This study also contributes to an explanation for the ‘overscreening’ phenomenon observed in the UK and USA, leading to the closure of some relatively recently built multiplexes.