AMC theatres is the second largest theater chain in the world, but depending on what city you're in, it can sometimes seem like the only chain in existence. It then makes sense how its ticket sales and where that occurs online might be something of a touchy subject. If you've ever used Fandango in the last five years and attempted to buy tickets at an AMC, you'd find you had mixed luck. Ticket sales deals between Fandango and AMC have gone off and on, but the contract between MovieTickets.com and AMC should have put that to rest. Their deal for exclusivity was supposed to make MT.com the only place you could go online to buy tickets. If you were an AMC Stubs member and you wanted to buy a ticket off their site? You were directed to MovieTickets.com. If you went to Fandango and looked up what was playing at your local AMC, you'd see showtimes but not have the option to buy tickets.
Not anymore though.
The deal has broken to pieces due to disagreements over which half of the equation hasn't held up their part of the deal, and the deciding vote will be handed down by the Palm Beach County Circuit Court in Florida.
This all raises the question: should any one website be allowed to handle all the ticketing for the second largest theater chain in the world? But more importantly, as it affects the consumer, should people have to jump around from one website to the next looking for the one that handles the theater they want to go to? Currently, both Fandango and MovieTickets.com want to be destinations unto themselves and not just checkout lines (which is what they are). If theaters are going to be split between a variety of different ticket vendors, then either consumers are going to have to memorize where each theater sells their tickets or we're going to have to transition to a point where we start at AMC or Regal's main websites and choose our tickets there.
With that in mind, let's consider the scenario of Times Square New York where the AMC Empire 25 and the Regal E-Walk movie theaters are across the street from one another. Now, if MovieTickets.com has its way, (and ignoring the fact that audiences at these movie theaters are always filled with obnoxious morons that talk on their phones during the feature - bitter, I know) and becomes the exclusive vendor for online AMC ticket sales, then, such as is the case of Times Square, you'd have to check Fandango (which has Regal listings) and then MovieTickets.com (which has AMC listings) to find out which theater has a movie at the time you want to see one. Yes, AMC should respect their agreement with MovieTickets.com if able, but the current practice is moving towards a very inconvenient practice that only benefits these online vendors and not the theaters and movie goers.
When you consider the hassle of having to check multiple sites to find times for different theaters, does the phrase "convenience fee" not become something of a cruel joke? Sure, Fandango may have let me buy my ticket online, but only after I spent ten minutes jumping back and forth between it and MovieTickets.com trying to figure out which theater had the movie at the time I wanted. If the business of MovieTickets.com and Fandango is to take our money and cut themselves off a slice, then it doesn't benefit them to make us loathe their services with fees and a splitting of theater chains. All of this is even more laughable when you consider that theaters typically make most of their money off of concessions, and so this big song and dance between ticket vendors is one tedious obstacle to get people in the door and standing in line at the snack queue. Whether or not people are actually seeing a movie and not just buying overpriced popcorn doesn't concern them that much.
