Same goes for the popcorn

Value is judged where it’s consumed

A small group goes to the theatre for the craft. They want the room, the sound, the screen, the ritual. They’ll notice the details, and they’ll keep paying for the experience.

Most people are doing a different math: tickets + parking + snacks + a babysitter turns “movie night” into a project. So they hit play at home.

And at home, the only thing that matters is what lands. If the movie feels flat, nobody cares why. They don’t separate the work from the way it shows up. They just decide it was overrated and move on.

That’s why I’m careful with “it was amazing in theatres” as a defense.

A good film is the one that tells a good story. Schindler’s List was black and white and it still hits like a truck. More recently, Oppenheimer didn’t need a candy-colored look to pull people in and keep them there.

Still, there’s a product lesson here: your quality bar has to match where customers actually experience the thing.

The home experience isn’t a side channel anymore. It’s the primary one. And yes, if you can afford it, you can get very close to a theatre now — a high-end OLED (or a top mini-LED) with Dolby Vision/HDR and a real Atmos setup is no joke.

But most customers live in the middle. They want easy, affordable entertainment that feels like the version everyone talked about.

So value delivery isn’t “we built it right.” It’s “it showed up right.” Wherever the customer eats the popcorn.