Boxoffice - October 2016

Marcus Theatres CEO, Rolando Rodriguez,
addresses the room.
currently offered by both Fandango and Movietickets.com, allowing
employees to sight-check a consumer’s admission without having to
resort to a pricy scanning device.
The New York Times recently reported that Fandango does 70
percent of its ticket sales through their mobile app, representing a
gradual consumer shift that has been taking place over the last couple
of years. For Ged Tarpey, head of Media & Entertainment at Twitter,
that shift can help distinguish third parties from other services. According
to Tarpey, around 90 percent of Twitter’s traffic comes from
mobile, providing an ideal opportunity for
apps such as Atom to carve their own space
in the market. “That’s where the users are,
and that’s why Atom Tickets makes so much
sense to me.”
Atom isn’t alone in prioritizing its mobile
presence; Fandango recently launched the
capability to buy cinema tickets through its
service via Facebook—a development first
announced at CinemaCon this year. Exhibitors,
however, haven’t been as up-to-date on
this front. Peach Cinema chief marketing
officer Malcolm MacMillan shared his frustration
about exhibitors’ slow adoption rate
of mobile websites. “The biggest mistake we
see, regardless of the territory, is not having a
mobile-sponsored website,” said MacMillan.
“Seventy to 80 percent of your audience will
John Scaletta
find you through their phone’s browser. Your
website is there to sell tickets—you need to make sure your platform is
absolutely solid, works well, and is easy to use.”
That convenience and ease of use is proving to be a deciding
factor on which platforms consumers will choose to buy their tickets
in advance. In some cases, the convenience is so enticing that the
advance-purchasing window isn’t that wide, according to Vista’s Leon
Newnham. “Across the theaters that run Vista, we can see when
people buy their tickets and what size group they are. Most people
buy tickets about a day in advance, with the exception of tentpoles,
and most come in groups of two. What we’ve
seen that has surprised us is a trend of people
buying their tickets online minutes before
a show time. You have to ask yourself, why
might that be? I suppose they walk into the
movie theater without a ticket, see a line at
the box office, and instead decide to buy
their tickets on their phones despite the
added convenience fee.”
Whether it’s as consumers or employees,
catering to millennials in the industry remains
a top concern. Improving the cinema experience
by focusing on ease and convenience,
however, is proving to be a cross-generational
standard that exhibitors are meeting through
the help of technology. Innovations will continue
to come—and when they do, exhibitors
should be ready and informed as to how they
can use them to their advantage. n
OCTOBER 2016 BoxOffice ® 81