A cinema pass allows you to take a punt on a film – for better or worse
◆ Buying a pass has encouraged us to get out instead of streaming on TV
We were probably 20 minutes into Sunny Chan’s Hong Kongset and made comedy Table for Six 2 when we realised we had made a big mistake.
The frothy family comedy about the love lives of squabbling brothers just wasn’t working for us. Mainly, we realised, because we hadn’t seen the hit original Table for Six which prompted the sequel, so we needed half the film to work out who was who to whom.
No matter. We lost a couple of hours, but hadn’t dropped £11 a ticket because we saw it at the Odeon Lothian Road, Edinburgh, using our mylimitless passes. We are 11 months into our first year and have bought another annual pass to continue our access to anything screened at any Odeon. If you pay monthly, it’s £14.99 a month, or £17.99 a month for Luxe cinemas. We bought our first annual pass for £110 each, taking advantage of a Christmas promotion and renewed for £120 at the following year’s seasonal deal. At those prices you only need to see something once a month to break even.
Although we have always loved watching films, before we decided on trying the passes we weren’t going to the cinema that often, content to wait for films to land on streaming services.
But as we work from home, getting out is something we need to do more of.
Now we make time to see films. We can pass an opinion on Oppenheimer (great), Barbie (so so), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (good stunts, a bit of a mess) and Killers of the Flower Moon (long, bleak but moving) because we have actually seen them.
We have also seen films we wouldn’t have seen without a pass, ones which wouldn’t have popped up on suggested viewing on our Netflix or Amazon Prime algorithm. I’m thinking of A Light Never Goes Out, for example, a little gem from Hong Kong (Odeon Lothian Road features quite a few Chinese films) about a widow who tries to keep her late husband’s neon sign-writing business going. It’s really a love letter to the artisan makers who created Hong Kong’s extraordinary neon signs that are being replaced by digital screens.
The Odeon offer isn’t perfect because too often multiple screens are filled with the same film and some we want to see don’t appear, but for us, it’s been worth it.