'Avatar' Midnight Screening Tickets Already On Sale

I was thinking about Avatar yesterday, wondering if it can really revolutionize the film industry. We'll certainly know more about how audiences respond to 3-D after December. I think it's fair to say that no movie's expectations as high as they are for Avatar have rested so much on the advancement and commercial viability of technology. It's an awfully expensive gamble, definitely a go-big-or-go-home moment for 3-D acolytes. Variety reports that AMC Theaters is anticipating quite a rush on tickets, to the point that...they're already on sale. Yeah, nearly four months out, about 50 AMC IMAX theaters across the country are selling seats for limited midnight screening of Avatar on December 18th. Fandango says the sales are "healthy," but since the announcement for the pre-sale was made at Avatar Day screenings last week, that's not surprising: There are only about 3,000 seats total in that many IMAX theaters, and since AMC just recently pitched the tickets to the exact audience curious enough to go see 15 minutes of the film, obviously they'd be more inclined to buy them early, expecting many more people to be just as curious as they are. Perhaps more than any other film this year, Avatar can be a bellwether for the future. If the gamble pays off and Avatar is a substantial hit (which means about $250 million in the US and the same amount abroad), then the studios will look more closely at ambitious, artistic projects like it and worry more about how to build the need to see the film rather than playing it safe all the time. If, however, it's a dud - and because of its very high price, that bar is unfortunately anything less than about half a billion worldwide - we won't see a film like this again for a long time, no matter how good it is. There can definitely be a kind of chilling effect on the parade of 3-D projects if this has two great weekends but doesn't sustain an audience much longer than that.

Comments

[Krystal]

3000 seats total divided by 50 AMC IMAX theaters = 60 seats per theatre. That can't be right because IMAX theaters hold hundreds of people. The math must be wrong someplace. Or is 3000 the total number of tickets they've sold so far?

[Get The Big Picture]

No, just one of my many typos. I was estimating 600 seats per theater, or 30,000 seats total.