About 10% of AMC movie showings sell zero tickets. This site finds them

I remember I went to a small showing once as a kid. It was just our group and 1 lady in the theater.

We got to small talk and the lady mentioned she had once been the only customer for a showing and told the projectionist that she didn’t want to be a bother and could come back and another day.

The projectionist had apparently replied that it was no bother - they would roll the movie even if no one showed up!

Do enough people buy tickets in advance now that this really indicates anything of value? I'm old and have never pre-purchased a movie ticket in my life. I assume a lot of people do, but the few times I've been to the movies lately, it seems people are buying tickets at the theater.

I have been quite a heavy patron of AMC theaters these past few years since COVID ended. I have seen A LOT of movies play to empty theaters. I used to actually peek at many of the rooms when I left my movie and so many were downright empty.

Its the norm and its probably why their stock is trading at $1.45 as of this writing.

Its a dead (not dying, dead) entertainment option. When you are competing for the same 24 hrs in a day with TV, Youtube, Gaming, Streaming, TikTok, Instagram and many others the theater is bottom of the barrel for young people today.

And don't tell me its because people are disrespectful or the commercials are too long. These are a problem but Alamo Drafthouse tried to tackle this and they ended up in bankruptcy. AMC would also be bankrupt today but it's saving grace was the meme stock frenzy they had a few years back. Probably bought them a few more years but that ride might be coming to an end.

Currently they fill the rooms for the pop movies like old established franchises but that only comes along every couple weeks at the most and the rest of the time the place is not really busy. This is a bit different in the big cities but AMC has overextended themselves with too many locations in the rural and suburban US.

...Also this app is not displaying accurate data (I assume they are pulling from AMC's API). My local theater is listing no results and I cross checked and there are movies currently listed that have 0 seats booked so the app is counting incorrectly for at least one theater.

EDIT: After I wrote this, the site auto updated with new data. Now I see some screenings but it is still inaccurate because it is still missing movies from that theater...maybe they are scraping instead of using the API? This is a simple problem if using the API (I wrote my own home cooked app): just iterate through all theater ids, find the ones with 0 bookings and display that list.

This is cool. Something about dropping everything to go see a movie in an empty theater is sort of tempting.

Would be a wonderful site for people to find places to have private movie sex, but then I remembered that this is HackerNews

Damn, people really love going to the movies here in Austin, Texas.