Discover more from BIG by Matt Stoller
Weird Monopoly: Cineplex and Canadian Movie Theaters
If you want to either show or see a recently released movie in Canada, it’s fairly likely that you have to go to Cineplex.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.
Last week, Canadian movie theater giant Cineplex pissed off its customers by imposing a $1.50 booking fee for tickets purchased online and on its mobile app. The ostensible excuse was that it can ‘invest in digital infrastructure,’ but no one was buying it. In a functional market, consumers could just go to a different theater. But Cineplex controls the Canadian movie theater industry, with roughly 75% market share.
How does Cineplex maintain its power? The monopoly story here is pretty simple. Like the movie theater chains in the U.S. prior to the 1948 Paramount Consent decree, Cineplex wields its power by denying rival small theaters access to movies that people might wish to see. If it’s playing in a Cineplex theater, then it’s not playing in a small theater. This thread from an art house movie theater explains the conduct.
My guess is that the booking fee is designed to cheat the studios, since there’s usually a revenue split of the ticket price between studios and theaters. A booking fee is a way of raising prices without sharing.
Before Covid, the independents were trying to get the Canadian competition authority to go after Cineplex, but the pandemic shut everyone down and made the problem moot, at least for a time. Now, with both inflation and the return of in-person movie screenings, the controversy is returning.
At any rate, there is a bit of competition with Landmark in some areas, but if you want to either show or see a recently released movie in Canada, it’s fairly likely that you have to go to Cineplex.
Weird Monopoly: Cineplex and Canadian Movie Theaters
Hey Matt, this is the first comment board I can find about weird monopoly suggestions that isn't locked. I hope you can find it and I hope one day thanks to your efforts, monopolies get broken up, wages rise, and I can afford to subscribe to you! Here's a really important one, maybe you've already heard of it.
Were you aware that there is a monopoly on lab mice? The Jax lab is the *only* place you can get lab rats from, to my knowledge. Every scientific experiment tested on mice in the past 30~40+ years came from here.
Full long story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s&t=2730s
Jax-specific segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s&t=3993s
The problems with this arrangement are
a) the breeding pool is pretty inbred
b) every mouse is raised in pristine conditions where it never faces hunger, predators, disease, or even a shortage of mates
c) thanks to monopolistic practices, they raise these mice pristinely, and breed them the first day they are sexually mature, to produce more mice and boot them out for lab sales
d) most importantly, every animal's DNA has these tails, known as telomeres, which are spent when cells need to reproduce, especially when they have to reproduce faster than normal, such as during the healing of a wound. Because ALL of these mice have the breeding environment they do, NONE of them have had their telomeres stressed. So they've evolved these ridiculously long telomeres over thousands of generations of lab mice from this one nest.
This makes them incredibly resistant to damage. The two places this interferes with research most, are in myocarditis, and cancer. It explains why the cure for cancer is so hard to find, and it explains why so many medicines taken off the market from Vioxx to COVID vaccines get recalled due to high myocarditis rates in humans. It's because ALL our lab mice are particularly resistant to those effects, so they never show up in lab tests.
Please research and blow open the Jax monopoly.