Average US movie ticket price

It appears that Americans have decided, collectively and without conscious agreement, that the price of admission to watch fictional people have problems should rise in exact proportion to the number of feral hogs roaming their state—a correlation so precise that you begin to wonder whether the hogs themselves are somehow dictating ticket prices through channels we have yet to discover. This is what happens when you give a pattern-seeking species enough data and a Friday afternoon: the universe reveals that it has been keeping score all along, just not in any way that makes sense.

Consider that both metrics track, rather faithfully, the same underlying currents of American life between 2006 and 2020: economic expansion and the geographical spread of what economists call 'resource pressure.' States with growing populations—particularly in agricultural regions—see both ticket price inflation (as multiplex chains optimize for higher-income urban sprawl) and exploding feral hog populations (which thrive in the same warming, fragmented landscapes where humans are busily building suburbs). A ticket that cost $6.50 in 2006 cost $9.16 by 2020, an increase of forty percent, while hog sightings across the South and Midwest roughly tripled—two different measures of the same restless expansion, one economic and one ecological.

We are, as a species, so determined to find the master lever that explains everything that we occasionally mistake two separate consequences of the same invisible hand for a cosmic conspiracy. The feral hogs do not care about your cinema ticket, and the cinema does not care about the hogs, and yet there they are, rising together like partners in an elaborate dance neither of them meant to join. We just noticed.