That's one way to boost ticket sales

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has no cause for complaint about its box office. It may be in the final weeks of being a truly muscular performer, or those final weeks may have already come and gone. As of right now, though, its nearly six-week run has produced a certainly healthy enough $1,032,361,535 worldwide, though I'm writing this at least a day* before I will publish it. (*It ended up being four days. I'm not rechecking the numbers.) By publishing time, maybe it will have already overcome the indignity of being a couple million dollars behind Despicable Me 3. Its current earnings have it at only 39th of all time, but with a couple more weeks of decent business it should easily crack the top 30 with an outside shot at the top 20.

And the Hoyts theater chain in Australia is certainly doing its part to get the movie there.

I'm a Hoyts member -- a membership I almost never use, since I try to see movies for free and Hoyts no longer participates in my critics card program. (The handful of us who were taking advantage of that were bankrupting them, it seems.) I think those 235 points you see above are a pretty paltry total.

As a member, though, I of course receive their emails, and Friday I got one entitled "Are you the ultimate Star Wars fan?" Curious, I clicked into it, and saw the following:

"See Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker more than anyone else to win!

The HOYTS Rewards member who sees the movie the greatest number of times will score an out-of-this-galaxy prize, a Samsung Galaxy 10+ Star Wars Special Edition prize pack valued at $1,999*.

There are also three runner-up fan packs up for grabs, filled with $200+ worth of official Star Wars merch."

The devil is in the details, so of course I followed that asterisk. It did not, it turned out, contextualize the stated $1,999 value of the prize pack, though I don't suppose you'd likely be able to audit the items to determine their true value. Plus, the true value of something like a signed poster is really in the eye of whoever is setting that value, based on what the market will bear. But as this particular prize pack is not going to market, it's all just speculation.

The point is not whether it's $2,000 worth of prizes (and in a situation like this, wouldn't it behoove you to round up?). The point is that this is a really funny way to get people to buy more tickets to The Rise of Skywalker, as I doubt there is any way to determine how close you are to the goal posts.

Because I know how these things work, I seriously doubt it would be possible to buy just one more ticket than your next closest competitor. It benefits Hoyts exactly zero to make a live purchase-meter available to people who are trying to win this pack. Instead, they implicitly want people to just keep blindly buying tickets to the movie (and presumably, actually going to see the movie) until such point that they think they must have outpurchased everyone else. Without, of course, really knowing when they will have attained that goal.

I suppose there would be some people who might try. And if everyone were as cynical as I am about the wisdom of doing so, you might win with only five or six total viewings.

But if you wanted to be sure to win, it would be a similar calculation to trying to buy enough lottery tickets to increase your own odds of winning the lottery. Which, as we all know, is an impossible task. Hypothetically, you reach a certain point where you have invested enough that if you do win a small amount of money, it is not significantly greater than the amount you invested, and if you don't, which is far more likely, then it leaves you destitute.

Now hopefully, buying $2,000 worth of tickets to The Rise of Skywalker -- which would be about 95 tickets, if you're using a $21 ticket price -- would not bankrupt anyone who was enterprising enough to try it. And you'd hope those same people would know it would be easier just to try to find the items and buy them. But how much of a discount on those items would make it worth buying the tickets? Would you buy 50 tickets in the hopes of securing that prize pack at half price? What if someone else had the same idea but bought 51?

In my previous calculations, I assumed that a live purchase-meter would not be in Hoyts' best interest, but maybe it would be. Maybe it would be a bit like an auction on ebay, where you knew if you still had to bid more to win the item. It would risk getting too few bidders and giving away the prize back for too little investment, but it could also create a bidding war between the two highest contenders, and ultimately earn Hoyts more money. The problem with that is it would create a situation where all the other competitors realized they had no realistic shot and stopped buying tickets. Having everyone blind bid is probably the better way to get more tickets sold overall.

Because I know how these things work, we'll never find out. This blind auction could produce a winner who bought only three or four more tickets, given that everyone who wants to see the movie more than once has probably already seen it more than once. But it could also take in excess of 20 or 30 more tickets, and if it does, it'll leave some seriously disappointed fan who bought just a few fewer than that, and finds himself out $600 with way too much of this film's mediocre screenplay memorized.