Want to see a new movie for a pound?

For all the argu­ing about the future of brick-and-mor­tar cin­e­mas, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that peo­ple do indeed like the act of going to the movies — it’s just that we all wish it was a slight­ly bet­ter ver­sion of itself. The expe­ri­ence often leaves some­thing to be desired, espe­cial­ly where tick­et prices are con­cerned, the rates inflat­ing to steep new highs that threat­en to under­mine the whole point of what’s sup­posed to be the cheap­est, most wide­ly acces­si­ble form of pub­lic entertainment.

Mar­cus Mark­ou has a plan. The inde­pen­dent film­mak­er made waves today with a press release announc­ing an unusu­al dis­tri­b­u­tion scheme designed to goose atten­dance for his lat­est fea­ture The Wife and Her House Hus­band. So long as the title plays the­atri­cal­ly, tick­ets will only put buy­ers back a sin­gle pound, just like in the good ol’ days that the major­i­ty of cur­rent­ly liv­ing peo­ple were not around to see.

The press release pro­vides a cur­so­ry syn­op­sis for the under-the-radar dra­ma as ​“a mov­ing and inti­mate sto­ry of a mar­ried cou­ple on the verge of divorce, when a let­ter from their past appears to draw them reluc­tant­ly back togeth­er,” though the release strat­e­gy for this film may be more eye-catch­ing than the text itself. Mark­ou him­self will appear at cin­e­mas play­ing his film to give a spe­cial intro­duc­tion, begin­ning with the Prince Charles in Lon­don on 10 March before expand­ing across the UK through April.

The draw for Markou’s unortho­dox gam­bit is twofold. One-quid tick­ets will help put cheeks in seats, which makes his film a more appeal­ing prospect for stream­ers look­ing to license, and that’s where a microbud­get pro­duc­tion such as this starts seri­ous­ly mak­ing back its mon­ey. But there’s also a built-in nov­el­ty fac­tor to this old-school William Cas­tle-style car­ni­val-bark­er gim­mick that nat­u­ral­ly accrues press in aggre­gat­ed news posts much like this one.

In an attached state­ment, Mark­ou says that he set out ​“to raise the pro­file of indie films at cin­e­mas and how indie film­mak­ers can build their own audi­ences,” well aware that the biggest chal­lenge fac­ing most unestab­lished artists is get­ting eye­balls on their work. But there’s a stur­dy prin­ci­ple under­ly­ing this risky attempt to infil­trate cin­e­mas: peo­ple real­ly and tru­ly love not pay­ing for things.