电影院里的骗局_BEC初级作文_BEC初级-查字典英语网

电影院里的骗局

Both distributors and exhibitors that I spoke to agree that cheating is much less rampant than before, say a dozen years ago, and now is mostly limited to third and fourth-tier cities. China Film Group, the nation's largest film production and distribution company, heads a consortium with several major private companies that hires 1,000 people to monitor cinemas nationwide, and Huaxia, another State-owned company, has a smaller army of 800.

However, there are situations even these sharp-eyed monitors can do little about. For example, if a cinema sells a ticket for 80 yuan, which is normal for primetime, but gives away a free popcorn, it may attribute as much as 60 yuan of the ticket price to the popcorn, leaving only 20 as the ticket price. But it can argue that 20 yuan is the minimum price for this particular film agreed upon by both sides and therefore it does not violate any rule.

A similar scheme was employed when Transformers 3 was bundled with Yang Shanzhou, a very small film with little box-office potential, making the latter into a strange film with eye-popping revenue (79 million yuan) but disproportionately fewer people who actually bothered to see it. There were sporadic online complaints about the practice even though consumers did not pay more for the package deal.

The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the regulating agency, announced measures in late January to curb under-reporting and cheating on box-office revenues. A special fund is set up to subsidize the upgrading of computer software at point of sale. The current system was installed in 2005 and "cannot keep up with the new situation", in the words of Jiang Tao, director of the fund. "The new system will fix loopholes and shorten the reporting window to only 10 minutes after a sale is made instead of waiting till next noon, which is the current reporting lapse in time, which leaves room for manipulation. The national platform will be ready by May and the cinema side will complete their upgrading by October."