Are you bored with the ordinary cinema-going experience? Fancy something a little different? For about $30, you could try the Paragon in Bangkok, where they give you a foot massage before the show. If you are in Seoul, pop along to the Cine de Chef, which combines a luxury movie theatre with gourmet dining. The cinema seats only 30 people, but what seats. Each cost a shade under $10,000 to install. A weekend movie ticket there will cost you more than $100 before you eat, but that includes valet parking and a private lift.

This kind of premium cinema is now common around the world, and it comes with regional flavours. In Austin, Texas, you can go to one of several Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, where black-clad waiters glide silently between rows of seats with pews in front, serving locally brewed beer and Texas delicacies. What I love about the Alamo concept is their combination of discipline and interesting programming. They have zero tolerance for talking and texting. If you break the rule, you will be warned; do it again and they throw you out without a refund.

"If you can't change your behaviour and be quiet, or unilluminated, during a movie, we don't want you in our venue," the cinema's co-founder, Tim League, said some years back. Tim, you da man.

There's a cinema in Jakarta that offers only double beds and blankets, rather than seats. That sounds like fun, until you think about not being the first couple on the bed or under that blanket today. If you're in London, you might like the 100-year-old Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, where they have six double beds in the front row, with individual cashmere blankets. Prime time, £30 for two. You'd hope for a long movie here.

London has been setting trends in this area for good reason. Lots of their cinemas are awful and expensive. Last year I paid £18.50 (then about $35) on a Saturday morning in the West End for a first-run movie. The almost empty cinema smelled like a jockstrap and the projection was worse. So much for premium experience. No wonder people are trying new ideas, such asthe Whirled Cinema in south London, housed in railway arches near Loughborough Junction station. This started five years ago. Two friends, Rob Lindsay and Mike Atterby, wanted to start a cinema but had no money: "We didn't think we could afford to pay anyone to do box office, so we came up with the idea of memberships."

The cinema, which has a bar, now has 700 members who pay £99 ($190) a year – for two people – or £10 for a week. There's a waiting list to join, because they have only 60 seats. They screen one second-run movie on four nights a week, no trailers or ads, and the cinema is rented on Saturday nights for parties. No one seems to mind the trains overhead. "The members find it kind of quirky," Lindsay tells me. "It is quite incredible how many films have a train in them, and how regularly a train will go overhead as the train is onscreen."

Sydney has a similarly quirky idea in the Golden Age cinema, housed in the old Paramount building in Surry Hills; Melbourne has an outdoor cinema on the rooftop of Curtin House in the CBD.

These places are benefitting from public dislike of the big first-run multiplexes. Sure, they offer premium options, but don't look too closely at the venues themselves. Some of them are decidedly shabby: peeling paint, scruffy toilets, filthy walls. If you abandon the city, you will pay for it. It's common to drop $20 for a ticket at the smarter suburban houses, where they allow you to take a beer or a glass of wine into the movie.

It's true that our wages are higher, so we pay more than people in most other countries, but where are the staff? It ain't the Alamo – talkers and texters have a paradise in Australian cinemas, because the owners have cut staffing to the bone. It's also true that paying full price is for mugs. Join a loyalty club, go on cheap Tuesdays, flash a pensioner card or find a freebie – such asthe new Film School Confidential screenings at Moore Park in Sydney, every second Wednesday at 6pm. They only do classics and you can't beat the price.

Of course, those of a more lawless bent will just download. This is certainly part of the worldwide drop in cinema attendance, but so is the cost of a ticket. The well-to-do, the childless and the underage might all fork out between $40 and $80 for a night out (for two), but anyone on Struggle Street can't afford it. That wasn't always the case. In the 1930s, Australians went to movies more often than anyone in the world. Movies were cheap, relative to wages, theatres were near where people lived and many of them had recently been upgraded with the coming of sound.  Yes, movies had a greater hold on the public imagination and that has been squandered, but the question of content is another argument.

The business is pricing itself out of the market, at a time when there has never been more competition for eyeballs. Worse, theatre-owners are slugging those who still want to come. High prices don't hurt the downloaders; they just create more of them.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes