Ticketmaster Lands Role in a Remake of Going to the Movies

Ticketmaster is going Hollywood.

The computerized ticket service will begin selling assigned seats for movies playing at General Cinema theaters across Los Angeles on Sunday in a move that may presage a national trend.

General Cinema will reserve about 15% of its best seats for advance sale at its 11 Los Angeles-area theater complexes. General admission seats will also be pre-sold. The service will cost $1 to $3 per ticket, depending on whether the seats are purchased by phone, at Ticketmaster outlets or at the box office.

Ticketmaster and General Cinema, which successfully experimented with the service in the Dallas area earlier this year, are targeting it to weekend moviegoers and families who want to avoid long lines.

The service is also seen as a way of updating and glamorizing the movie exhibition business, which has suffered from stagnant attendance for more than a decade.

“You have to put movie theaters in context of the ‘90s,” said Paul Del Rossi, General Cinema’s president. “It’s all about customer service. There are many alternative entertainment choices (such as video), and we have to provide the same level of customer service.”

Ticketmaster is the country’s leading ticket service, with more than 2,500 outlets and an estimated $1 billion in annual ticket sales. The Los Angeles-based company plans to offer the service to other theater chains if the local experiment succeeds.

Service charges are controversial. Ticketmaster is fighting two class-action antitrust suits in California that challenge the fairness of its add-on costs.

But Frederic D. Rosen, Ticketmaster’s chairman, said the market will determine the demand for the new service. He and Del Rossi both stressed that the majority of movie theater seats will remain general admission.

“All this does is let the public decide what they want to do,” Rosen said. “This decade is all about access, convenience, service and value. If the public perceives that there’s value to this, they’ll use it. If not, they won’t.”

Analysts who follow the movie business foresee limited financial impact from advance sales, since it affects only a small number of seats. Jeffrey Logsdon of Seidler Amdec Securities in Los Angeles sees it as a “weekend thing.” He also predicts that it will be most popular in urban areas, where crowding is more of a problem.

But Hollywood executives are intrigued by any development that offers the promise of boosting attendance, since ticket sales have been mired around the 1-billion-a-year level since the 1970s.

Del Rossi declined to disclose specific numbers from advance sales in Dallas, pending a report to the movie industry. The program, however, is just one of many efforts aimed at drawing more people into theaters. Movie chains have also offered prizes, free food and other incentives, and AMC theaters have experimented with an automated ticket-ordering service.

General Cinema, one of the country’s leading theater chains with yearly revenue of more than $450 million, will charge an extra dollar for reserved seating. There will be no extra charge for general admission seats sold in advance.

Ticketmaster will add a service charge of $1.50 at its outlets and $2 over the phone, with children’s tickets costing slightly less. Tickets ordered over an automated phone line will carry a $1 service charge, but must be picked up at the theater.

Del Rossi is predicting long lines--at the Ticketmaster outlets.

“Is this a cure-all panacea? Absolutely not,” he said. “But it’s one of those things theater owners must do to expand their service.”