A Different Kind of Concert (updated)

Authored by Scott Goldberg on October 12, 2006 - 6:32am.

It looks like there's already a company to turn to for the "Movie Theater Concert" project I wrote about last week. It's called Big Screen Concerts. They had an impressive playlist on their site, including Phish and Widespread Panic. Peter Grenney wrote that one of the problems movie theaters have is the "skate punk" crowd loitering outside. Wouldn't it be great, he said, if a movie theater made positive use of that fact rather than fighting it. He also offered that, increasingly, theater owners are trying to come up with ways to make their real estate usable in a round-the-clock way. For example, conferences could be held in the large auditoriums, meetings, etc.

Well instead of going that lame route, you could make the theater targeted to a younger audience and acheive the same effect. For example, you could gut the theater and install a rock-clmbing wall, a skateboard halfpipe, video games, etc. Make it a Dave-and-Buster's kind of feel, but with a giant movie screen that showed great concerts of the past and present. If Rod Stewart can charge $15 to watch his lame new covers' album, I'd pay $20, at least, to watch Beck or The Mars Volta.