Two minutes with Danny Katz: The calculated risks of allocated cinema seating

I recently visited the cinema, having booked my seats online. Upon finding my allocated seats were taken, the interloper asked, “Do you want us to move?” I didn’t want a confrontation, so I went to another seat. Should I have told her to move?
W.L., Pyrmont, NSW

A: Unwatchable, artless Hollywood movies aren’t the biggest problem with modern cinema: the biggest problem is the allocated seating system when you go watch these unwatchable, artless Hollywood movies.

Allocated seating does not work. First, you have to go online and pick out your seats using only a tiny diagram of a seating plan, which requires architectural knowledge, trigonometric calculations and the mental construction of a cinema diorama on a 400:1 scale.

Once you’ve picked your seats and show up, you find they’ve clumped the entire audience in the middle so the ushers have less cleaning to do – there could be just three people watching the movie, but you’ve all been seated directly behind each other, in descending head-size order. Or you show up to find someone’s sitting in your allocated seat, so you have to politely ask them to move – and if they do move, you end up sitting in a buttock-heated seat with handfuls of their dropped popcorn rolling around in the cheek grooves.

Unfortunately, allocated seating is here to stay so if the cinema is full, you should fight for your allocated, buttock-heated seat: you earned it with your pre-planning, trigonometric calculations, diorama-visualising – and that $3.30 online booking fee.

But if the cinema is mostly empty, maybe avoid a confrontation and sit somewhere else. Ideally, directly in front of the people who stole your seats. Until someone else asks you to move.

guru@goodweekend.com.au

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