Okaz newspaper

I WAS more than disappointed by the reopening of a cinema house in the Kingdom after a lull of more than three decades.

The first disappointment was that a lecture hall was chosen to present the first film to the Saudi audience.

The second was that the price of the cinema ticket was fixed at SR75!

We could have waited until a proper movie theater was created with its special seats instead of rushing to project the first film in a lecture hall which lacked comfortable chairs of a cinema house.

The lecture hall also lacked the audio-visual effects which characterize the cinema houses.

The organizers might have thought that serving pop corn was enough the provide the audience with a cinema ambience forgetting that the crucial element in the cinema was the audio-visual effects which were lacking.

The price of the tickets was extremely exaggerated. It might be double that in the nearby GCC countries and also in the US which is the original home of the cinema.

If one of the aims of opening a cinema house in the Kingdom was to curb the migration of the tourist spending, we have simply not done anything in this regard.

The situation is exactly similar to the exaggerated prices of the hotels in our tourist cities.

The spending of a vacation outside is less costly than spending the holidays inside the Kingdom.

However, it seems that the culture of making quick gains is not only still dominant in our country but is expanding.

What is this entertainment we extend to the society with prices of cinema, musical shows and gala nights at double their prices in other countries?

This is unless, as I said in a previous article, this entertainment was only meant for the already entertained people not for the rank and file.

I hope that the Authority for the Audio-Visual Media would reconsider the prices of movie theaters compared to the cinema houses in the rest of the world.

If this did not happen, the most popular film to be shown in the Kingdom would be "Greed".