Going to the Movies Is Being Ruined in One Specific, Infuriating Way

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On Tuesday, presale tickets for the highly anticipated finale to Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster Dune trilogy went on sale. This is a whopping four months before the film’s Dec. 18 premiere, and the second ticket prerelease for the film after a limited number of tickets for its opening weekend went on sale back in April and sold out almost instantly. Like the Homeric efforts required to snag a coveted ticket to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey—particularly in the IMAX 70 mm format, which only 25 theaters in the country can accommodate—the knives of many Dune fans chipped and shattered as the presale unraveled into a chaotic bloodbath of greedy scalpers and film bros combating technical difficulties and long lines to secure a seat to see Dune on the biggest of big screens. If you, like me, hoped and tried to get even one ticket, it was virtually impossible.

And when I say virtually, I mean it. The app and site for the theater chain AMC crashed almost immediately, while the queues on the general ticket-buying site Fandango and other theater chain sites were incredibly long and also buggy. These technical difficulties incentivized anyone who could dip out of work to buy their ticket in person to venture to their nearest theater showing IMAX 70 mm. But if what awaited you was anything like New York City’s famed AMC Lincoln Square theater—which has the biggest IMAX screen in the country—you would have been met with a massive line of people who had already been queuing for hours by the time tickets went on sale. Even then, you would have waited hours just to watch the (presumed) scalpers ahead of you brag about being able to buy an alleged 80 tickets in front of your face. You would then have gone online to see those tickets being resold at a markup so bonkers that the price of a front-row ticket to see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé would feel like pocket change.

Many disappointed fans and journalists have seen this blunder as the straw that has broken the camel’s back, lamenting how absolutely ridiculous movie ticket sales have become. More and more consumers online have compared this experience to the extreme difficulties of buying a ticket to a high-demand concert these days, dubbing it the “Ticketmasterization” of movie tickets, in reference to Ticketmaster monopolizing the market of live-event ticket sales while intentionally subjecting patrons to exploitative pricing befitting of a capitalist hell.

This Ticketmasterization … Ticketmasterification … concertification … whatever-ification of movie tickets is relatively new. It’s only in recent years that a large swath of general theatergoers have begun to care about what format they see films in. I personally attribute this mostly to the viral video of director Ryan Coogler explaining different film aspect ratios to promote his film Sinners. This video inspired further education and awareness about film formats, leading director Boots Riley to make a video about anamorphic lenses to promote his film I Love Boosters, and various social media accounts to circulate graphics showing how the different aspect ratios would crop the frame. Then you get filmmakers like Nolan, whose long-standing history with IMAX led to him nabbing the historical first of shooting the first feature film entirely on 70 mm IMAX film with The Odyssey, and you can understand why the most ardent of moviegoers are competing for the same coveted seats.

I want to be clear and say that as a movie lover myself, I think this wellspring of passion is largely a good thing! It’s great that more audience members are learning and caring about the art of filmmaking, down to the technical aspects. Plus, high demand for movie tickets can help save an industry consistently under threat by the encroachment of streaming platforms that are owned by tech CEOs who don’t believe in the true theatrical experience.

But also: Frankly, this sucks! Not only does the nature of these movie releases result in filmgoing feeling more exclusive—available to the few who have the time, money, or just dumb luck to snag early prime seats—but it also results in people who did see the movie still walking away with a sense of FOMO if they didn’t see it in the most premium of formats, such as IMAX 70 mm. Additionally, this entire phenomenon may play on some of our less healthy human tendencies. Stephanie Wang, a professor of economics, told Wired that for some people, their desire for a movie ticket might increase simply upon learning that “many other people also want the ticket and cannot have it,” and that some fans may feel that they are truer fans because they managed to see a film in the best format.

I can’t even necessarily blame these fans for feeling this way, because it’s actually becoming increasingly true. Dune: Part Three will include 71 minutes of IMAX-exclusive expanded-aspect-ratio footage, meaning that the viewers who get these tickets really will be treated to a different experience. Seeing movies with my friends is one of my favorite things to do, but for this year’s biggest releases, I’ve been lucky if I could manage to see the films in IMAX 70 mm at all. Instead, people have resorted to seeing The Odyssey at ungodly hours, or they’ll admit, with some amount of shame, that they’ve seen it only in other formats, like Dolby. Personally, I’ve seen The Odyssey twice, but never in IMAX 70 mm—it’s ludicrous that I still don’t know what the top of Agamemnon’s headpiece looks like on the big screen.

Adam Aron, AMC’s CEO, has already publicly apologized for the Dune: Part Three snafu, announcing that “$2 million of IT programming resource” will be put toward solving this problem. But addressing the true heart of the issue—the Ticketmasterization of movie tickets, as opposed to the simpler problem of AMC’s site crashing—seems harder to do. And no business making this much money off basic supply-and-demand imbalances would be incentivized to do it. Many fans have suggested that starting with withholding ticket releases until one month out would help, though I’m unsure about that. Others have urged theater chains to crack down on resellers, which is even harder to curb, though a cap on ticket sales per person would be a good place to start.

Whatever—there are people who are getting paid much more than me to figure this out, but they should figure it out, and fast. I worry that while these hot ticket sales are great for the industry in one way, the whole thing might also abide by Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more people start to feel as if their theater experience outside IMAX 70 mm doesn’t matter, the more comfortable they might become with pirating a film or waiting for it to hit streaming, both mindsets that helped kill movie theaters in the first place. They might even feel more OK with watching Dune: Part Three in 500 parts on TikTok, which could mean more dreaded phones out in theaters. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck complaining about tickets we’ll never get. And here I thought heartbreak was supposed to feel good in a place like this.