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Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

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Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#271

Post by listenallyall »

WorldMaker wrote: post #234
bombcar wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea was they'd bootstrap it by giving you a credit card that could buy one ticket (which is all it was, a weird debit/credit card with a $15-20 authorization limit and a limited number of merchants accepted) - and then get the theaters onboard so that the theaters would be paying for it. So (in theory) it's a "win win" if they get everyone onboard - the theater gets to sell popcorn, the movie studio gets a buck…

AMC was one of the theater chains that did figure it out, but was also smart enough to realize that they didn't need the middle man and had a large enough chain to leverage. AMC A-List still exists. (Up to 4 movies per week at $23-35/month.)

> "smart enough"

AMC is the dumbest company (or more specifically, its CEO Adam Aron is the dumbest executive). MoviePass came in out of nowhere and became the largest purchaser of movie tickets... millions every week. And AMC actively fought against them, refused to even let them buy tickets at full price, and led the charge to drive them out of business. For what alternative? Mostly, nothing but empty seats.

AMC's stock price is $1.59 as I write this vs $50-70 while MoviePass was peaking around 2018. AMC had to do a 10-to-1 reverse stock split to avoid being delisted, they may need to do another one. They even got a brief "meme stock" spike over $250 and managed to do absolutely nothing productive (except pay the CEO more) with this new capital access.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#272

Post by listenallyall »

WorldMaker wrote: post #246
tracker1 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one I was thinking of... I didn't know of a separate "MoviePass" than what AMC and a few other theaters did that was similar.

Yeah, "MoviePass" was its own SV startup that tried to be the generic version of this pass and apply to "all" theaters. It burnt through a bunch of VC funds just to fail and it shouldn't have been a huge surprise that big chains like AMC decided to do their own similar passes on their own without a middleman.

I'd say it is indeed a huge surprise that a struggling company refused to do business with another entity which was trying to purchase tens of millions of dollars of its product.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#273

Post by pdmfz »

pchristensen wrote: post #223
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #201

This is not just an awesome concept, but blazingly fast. Well done! I would love to see an article about the tech stack.

The Fandango app has an option to check the seats at all the showings at a theater, so I assume AMC has something like that. There are ~600 AMC theaters in the US. Throw in some caching and you can maintain a fast, fairly fresh copy of their seating numbers. Clever!

AMC seems stingy about giving access to their API. I wonder if this site scrapes data from the AMC website

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#274

Post by specproc »

ekimekim wrote: post #263
specproc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a VUE, my flatmate was a manager. I always complained about the awful, awful films we showed with no one watching them. Surely it'd be better to show some classics that would sell? Apparently the deal back then was that theatres had to buy films in packages. If you wanted the latest blockbuster, you had to buy a bunch of terrible dross, and commit to showing it X times.

That practice is known as Block booking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_booking ) and was supposedly ruled illegal in 1948. The more things change, I guess...

Ruled illegal in the United States.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#275

Post by [deleted] »

zem wrote: post #253
mizzao wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was the case, but then I went to a full movie theater and really enjoyed being a part of an audience that was all experiencing the same thing. You could feel the emotion and that is a different sense than having the theater all to you to, but potentially just as rewarding.

sadly, covid has killed that :( now i would just be scared sitting in a closed space that crowded.

[deleted]

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#276

Post by huhkerrf »

cbeach wrote: post #143
vlovich123 wrote: post #108

To me this suggests that theater’s are at least partially incorrectly pricing things which explains why they are struggling.

I think Hollywood has been churning out derivative content for a while, and catering for "modern audiences" (as opposed to the silent majority) too much. One or two exceptions - Project Hail Mary, for example. But the decline of Marvel, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises has been stark. https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker has some great commentary on the problem. Also, a number of other factors: * massive TVs…

It's ironic that you're bemoaning derivative content, but the exception you mention is a movie derived from a book.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#277

Post by vlovich123 »

bombcar wrote: post #209
vlovich123 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all tickets is similarly insane. It needs to be demand driven - sold out show? Prices too low. Can’t get butts in seats? prices too high. You want prices set such that it’s almost but not quite at capacity. This gives you slack to accept stragglers while optimizing your profit on the price demand curve.

The problem is that if you take this too far, nobody knows what it costs to go to the movies, so everyone will just stick the "high cost" in their mind, and not go. This is why they always gravitate to "$5 before noon/4pm" or "$5 Tuesdays" or similar things that are easy to remember. I'm waiting for them to have the best seats in the house be the large armchairs for $20, and the rest of the shitseats be normal stadiu…

Make it app driven to simplify like Uber does. And it should be closer to how large theatrical shows are - fridays at peak time most expensive, different seats have different pricing etc. anyway, movie theaters hit a local optimum decades ago and the people running them failed to evolve.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#278

Post by GJim »

nebula8804 wrote: post #265
GJim wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My area of NJ apparently could care less Surely you mean " couldn't care less"?

Sure, im fine with either and at 3AM I'll write one or the other.

So you switch opinions randomly at 3 am?

I'm afraid you are making less and less sense.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#279

Post by thrownthatway »

PaulHoule wrote: post #144
technothrasher wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once flew on a flight from ORD to ROC where I was the only passenger. It was very, very weird to be in a big empty cabin all by myself. The flight attendant just came and did the safety briefing sitting next to me. I asked her why they didn't just cancel the flight, and she said the plane had to be in ROC for the next morning anyway. This was in the 1990s though. I've never encountered anything like that since.

It is still like that. The airline’s operations all depend on the flight crew being in the right place at the end of the flight, which is a higher priority than getting a passenger there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...

Dao was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, including a broken nose, loss of two front teeth, sinus injuries, and "a significant concussion"; the injuries required reconstructive surgery, according to Dao's lawyer.

and

"He said, 'I can’t get off the plane. I have to get home. I'm a doctor. I have to get to the hospital in the morning.'" Myers stated that her response was not appropriate: "She said, 'Well, then I'll just have to call the police and have you escorted off the plane.'

Savage.

Re: Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

#280

Post by fho »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #111
fho wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my student jobs was to transport film spools to theaters. They would arrive at my door in a box, I would walk them to the cinema on a small trolley and spend 2-3 hours in the projection rooms. The reels were spliced on site by a technician, projected, cut again and I transported them back home where they would be picked up again. The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copy…

Wow. Was there any premier viewings on the spools you moved?

Actually yes. It's been a while, but now that you mention that, that probably was the reason for somebody (me) bringing the reels to the cinemas for a single showing in the first place.
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