MovieTickets.com

» see movietickets.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MovieTickets.com was American at the contract layer, which is the layer that decides whether a site can exist in your country at all. Everything about it was a set of deals with theater chains, and those chains were in North America. In Turkey through the same years you bought a cinema ticket at the counter or, later, through a local booking service, and no amount of interest on my part would have made this site work for a single screen near me.

It was built in 2000 as a defensive move. AMC Theatres and Hollywood.com set it up as a joint venture and then brought in National Amusements, with CBS and Famous Players also aboard before launch, which tells you the whole point. Fandango was founded the same year by a rival group of chains. Nobody in exhibition wanted a single outside company standing between them and their own customers, so the exhibitors built the intermediary themselves and split it.

For a while it worked. In 2001 it linked up with Moviefone, and by 2004 it was Moviefone's exclusive online ticket vendor, which mattered enormously in a period when a lot of Americans still found showtimes by dialing a phone number. A consignment deal with PrintTixUSA in mid-2005 brought in twenty more exhibitors and pushed it past ten thousand screens. In 2010 it sold more than sixteen million tickets for over two hundred exhibitors across fourteen thousand screens.

Then it stopped growing and started losing partners, and the story of the next fifteen years is a slow subtraction that ends with the company being bought by the thing it was created to prevent.

~ the record ~

~ the war with fandango ~

The mechanism of the loss was consolidation among the theater chains themselves. When Regal acquired Hoyts, Hoyts went with it to Fandango, because Regal had helped found Fandango. Every merger in exhibition moved screens from one ticketing site to the other without either site doing anything.

The worst of it came from inside. AMC had co-founded MovieTickets.com and in 2012 announced a newly expanded partnership with Fandango instead, at which point its own fellow shareholders in MovieTickets.com sued it for breach of contract. In May 2012 Moviefone let the relationship lapse and went to Fandango too. AMC came back as a non-exclusive partner in 2014 and Regal added non-exclusive listings in 2015, but non-exclusive is a different business: it means being one of two places to buy the same seat, competing on nothing.

~ the long tail ~

Fandango announced the purchase on 13 October 2017 and closed it in the fourth quarter. On paper the numbers looked close, Fandango at more than 33,000 screens and MovieTickets.com at over 29,000, but the overlap was enormous. Both sold tickets to AMC and to Regal. The real acquisition was international reach in Latin America and about twenty percent more screens, and the site was worth more as a customer list than as a competitor.

What is unusual is what happened next, which is nothing, for eight years. Fandango kept movietickets.com running as its own storefront, with its own front page and its own showtime listings, long after there was any competitive reason to. The last archived version of the real site was captured on 29 June 2025. From late July 2025 onward every request to the domain answers with a redirect into fandango.com carrying a small parameter marking where the visitor came from, which is now the only trace left of a company its own exhibitors built to keep this exact thing from happening.

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