"Dinner & a movie" gets a completely new meaning.

Dinner & a movie.

You’ve heard the phrase. Likely been on a date that fits the description.

How did it play out? What were the steps?

For most of my adolescent / adult life, dinner & a movie has involved me accompanying someone to dinner. We go through the full service encounter of a meal. Maybe it includes drinks. At the end of that service experience, we then we leave the restaurant and go to a movie to engage in another, completely separate, service experience.

So why has it taken so long to put these experiences together in a single service experience?

AMC Theatres’ Fork & Screen is the type of in-theatre dining experience that is quickly becoming more common. It combines a small capacity theatre with a full-service restaurant & bar for in-viewing table service.

It’s service genius, but I don’t feel that it should have been. To moviegoers, it is a unique experience, but it simply combines two pre-existing experiences in a new way. Two experiences that have been linked since both have been in existence. So why is Dinner AT a movie only becoming more common now?

Because as business owners and service managers tend to be narrow in our definitions of their business model. On one hand, restaurants are busy trying to be the most successful restaurant on their block, in their category, whatever. On the other, theatres are trying to take share from the other local theatres - so much so that it takes a special brand of myopia to operate a movie theatre, knowing that many patrons are coming directly from a meal, have in your theatre a foodservice operation, yet never link that perhaps you could be stealing share from another industry entirely by viewing your business model a little more expansively.

Somebody looks a little more expansively at what customers do before and after their experience, and bring forward a new experience that either existing model are at a disadvantage competing against.

So what’s your industry’s “dinner & a movie”?