Stephen Lackey
There’s always some new film related application hitting smart phones to hijack your film going experience. With that said Fandango has been the go to app for those that want to buy tickets in advance and not wait in line. More often than not it’s about making sure to get opening night tickets before thy sell out too. There’s a new kid on the block, Atom Tickets and it will buy your first ticket to a Regal Cinema for you if you give it a go. Funny, not long ago Regal instigated the roped off lines to concessions and I found it annoying. Well now I may know why. Atom Tickets does more than just get your ticket in advance.
Movie tickets have been in a downward spiral for years and some major Hollywood studios have dropped $50 million bucks into Atom Tickets in hopes of offering some new features that will spur ticket sales. The core competency of Atom Tickets is buying blocks of tickets for groups of friends heading to the cinema together. The app allows you to first poll a group of friends from your Facebook friends list on what movie everyone wants to see. Once a movie is picked the person that created the poll can block off the tickets and each person in the group pays their portion of the block trough the app. Suddenly you don’t have to wait for your buddy to pay you back because you got stuck buying all the tickets. This will be huge for buying assigned seat tickets at IMAX. There’s more, for the first time in cinema history Atom Films allows for variable pricing! If your group is large enough you will get discounted tickets. The qpp also allows a theater chain to discount tickets for movies not doing well at the box office.
Back to the earlier comment about the new concessions cue. Atom tickets also allows you to buy all of your movie snacks in advance! There’s a special express cue for Atom Tickets users (Regal Cinemas) where you grab your goods and go! So many times I show up late to the theater and barely make the previews due to a long concession line of indecisive people. I took the app for a spin and it was overall a success! The theater still appears to be working out the concessions kinks but overall it worked great. Now remember if you buy snacks in advance don’t do so until near your movie start time because your snacks will be made the minute the order is placed.
The app is clean modern and fast. Everything worked great and each step makes perfect sense. Above all of the other advantages to this app it’s cleaner and more stable than Fandango. On top of that there’s concessions and variable pricing. So far Atom Tickets is a real innovation. We will keep you updated on how it evolves!