APP AIMS TO RESERVE, AND ATTRACT, SEATS
Movie theatres seeking ways to pull viewers from living rooms
Stan Meyers has two conditions for going to a movie: It has to be in an Imax theatre, and he has to be able to reserve a seat in the top two rows.
“The ideal seats are higher than you would think, because the screen is so tall,” he explained. “If they aren’t available, I just don’t go.
Meyers, who analyzes movietheatre companies for Piper Jaffray & Co., knows better than most how increasingly easy it is to reserve a seat at the cinema. The rest of us will find out soon enough. All the major movie theatre companies in the U.S. are steadily adding seat reservations across their tens of thousands of screens, in a bid to lure people away from increasingly impressive televisions and the vast, expanding universe of streaming video.
“It’s a tough game, and they’re experimenting,” Meyers said. “In five years, I would expect 50 per cent of all screens to have reserved seating.”
Atom Tickets, a startup that sells tickets and concessions via app, said 20 per cent of its 2,000 theatre partners now offer seat booking.
“We try to make everyone feel like a VIP, and reserved seating is definitely a part of that,” said Atom co-founder Matthew Bakal.
The most aggressive adopter to date is AMC Entertainment, where people can call dibs on seats at almost one-third of its 400 or so U.S. theatres. This month, the company added reservations to all eight of its Manhattan locations, and it expects the option to be a prerequisite for all of its theatres “in the medium-term future.”
To anyone who’s ever attended a sporting event or boarded an airplane, reserved seating in the- atres will seem about as vanguard as the VCR. After all, seat assignments have long been standard in theatres in Europe and China. But there are valid reasons U.S. cinema executives have long eschewed seat booking: It’s somewhat expensive, and it’s tough to model.
If moviegoers don’t have to arrive early to snag decent seats, theatres may struggle to sell onscreen advertising slots before the ”show. While ticket sales and concessions make up the bulk of the movie business, nearly six per cent of revenue at both AMC and Regal last year came from onscreen ads and such peripheral money-makers as arcade games.
There are also some added costs. Some reservation software is involved, and seating configurations generally vary by theatre, so the technology must be customized by location. Then there’s the potential headache of refereeing disputes between people who reserve seats online and those who prefer to buy tickets early and hunker down in the best spots.
With movie-going masses used to a first-come, first-claimed model, mitigating this friction could take a while.
Young adults, for one, are staying home. From 2010 to 2015, Americans aged 18 to 39 bought 16 per cent fewer movie tickets. These are the people most likely to be building careers and raising children; they have better ways to spend 45 minutes than standing in line at the local megaplex. Babysitters don’t come cheap, and HBO’s Game of Thrones is now à la carte, at $15 a month.
“Competition from TV is very, very real,” said Ben Mogil, a media analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. “Lots of people just don’t go to the movies at all anymore.”