I went on a little mini-rant about this on Twitter the other day, my basic point being that outside on inflation and cost of operations, you can't raise prices without adding value. And I got news for these theaters who think this can work: the ushers, who spend about 30 seconds cleaning up the theater between shows, aren't going to care who's sitting where. No one's going to be checking those assigned seats.
This is just giving people more reason to skip the theatrical window and wait for the disc or streaming version. The money saved on tickets (which would be more, cause you know the high ticket price standard would be the LOWEST price, NOT the highest price) would go towards a bigger, higher-resolution TV (which are becoming cheaper by the day).
Raising the ticket prices arbitrarily puts one more barrier between the customer and the product, which is the stupidest business plan you could possibly hope to come up with. You need MORE reasons to bring people to the theater: more movies, more variety, special events, etc. They do Fathom Events but those are few and far between, they only happen one night at a time and they aren't advertised much (I only ever hear about it when I'm ALREADY in the theater for something else). Sometimes they'll show a revival of a movie or a live concert or a play, but imagine if they did more. What if one weekend they showed a whole season of Game Of Thrones. I'd go in an instant! They could have a food truck or BBQ or whatever, charge 20 bucks or something and I bet they could fill TWO theaters. What if Vimeo did a nationwide week-long campaign of their latest, greatest hits in the theater, like a mini-festival? I bet people would go.
Movie theaters aren't places where people go to see Hollywood movies: they're communal spaces with multimedia, and there's SO much potential there to be explored, but they don't do that because they only see themselves as delivery systems for a specific, narrow band of content (Hollywood films), and they're not making a good return on that anymore. They should be doing what home systems CAN'T do, and doing it as best as they can.