$50 Million App Helps Friends Go To The Movies Together

A new app newly backed by $50 million from three Hollywood studios — Fox, Disney and Lionsgate — is giving a new old meaning to being social. Atom Tickets, which is testing in three markets already, allows its users to coordinate “going to the movies” with friends online, sometimes offering discounts to groups, prepaying for the cotton candy and allowing everyone to pay their own way upfront.

It’s yet another blow to the legacy of the dead Presidents and axiom-coiners, as there’s “no need to pull out your wallet or mess with cash,” according to the Atom website. It is available for free for both Android and iOS devices.

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With 20 employees in “a former storage closet next to a screening room in Lionsgate’s Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters,” Atom “has plans to launch nationwide this summer, potentially posing the first serious challenge to Comcast Corp.’s Fandango, which has long dominated the online ticket market, since it and the smaller MovieTickets.com launched in 2000,” Ben Fritz writes in breaking the story for the Wall Street Journal Sunday.

Fandango, a subsidiary of Comcast’s NBCUniversal Media, sells tickets to more than 25,000 screens and has more than 30 million online and mobile visitors each month, according to comScore, the Fandango website states. (ComScore, by the way, completed its merger with Rentrak this morning.)

Fandango, meanwhile, is “making aggressive moves of its own,” Fritz reports. 

On Friday it acquired M-Go, “a site that lets users purchase and rent digital movies and TV shows online — in a move to bolster its perks for ticket buyers,” as Ryan Faughnder reports for the Los Angeles Times. Fandango has done similar “super ticket” bundling in the past using outside retailers. 

“The ‘SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water’ super ticket, for example, included a pre-order of the new animated film, plus a copy of the previous SpongeBob movie, for $15 more than the ticket price,” Faughnder writes.

Fandango also is talking with Warner Bros. “to acquire that studio’s movie website Flixster in exchange for equity, a person with knowledge of the discussions said,” the WSJ’s Fritz reports.

Meanwhile, Atom Tickets has been going about growing its business under the leadership of CEO Ameesh Paleja, an engineer by trade who got his start at Microsoft before moving on to Amazon.com, and co-founder and chairman Matthew Bakal, a Harvard English major and Harvard Business School MBA who is said to have “extensive experience on both the creative and financial sides of the media business.”

According to the company bio page, “much of Atom's design was born of Ameesh’s frustration with planning a night out at the movies with friends.” He is also available for a “friendly poker game,” we’re told, although he’s purportedly “not very good.” Sounds like an app in the making.

Paleja says “the platform utilizes ‘cutting edge’ data analysis and targeting techniques to help connect movie-goers to the specific films consumers want to see,” writesVariety’s Dave McNary.

“We believe that Atom Tickets has the potential to revolutionize the way audiences go to the movies, and we’re delighted to partner with blue chip studios like Disney and Fox in this cutting edge initiative for the theatrical business,” says Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns in a statement cited by the Hollywood Reporter’s Pamela McClintock. 

“More than four billion seats go unsold in theaters each year, and Matthew, Ameesh and the Atom team have developed a state-of-the-art app that offers exciting new opportunities to pre-purchase tickets and concessions as well as paving the way for the successful introduction of dynamic ticket pricing,” Burns continues.

McClintock reports that only about 15% of movie tickets are currently sold online, which suggests that there’s ample room for growth.

“This is an exciting opportunity for us and, more importantly, for our audiences,” says 20th Century Fox chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos in a statement cited by Variety’s McNary. “Atom Tickets provides an enhanced social experience for consumers to discover and purchase tickets to movies, designed for ease of use on mobile devices. Atom’s unique interface and integration with movie fans’ social networks creates a streamlined, fun way to go to movies with friends.”

And arrange for a loan to prepay for the ridiculously overpriced concessions before you get there.

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