i don’t see how there can be an argument against pre assigned seats.

#1 drawback to pre-selected seating. Cost. Your tickets will cost more and the theater’s staffing costs will go way up. As I’m sure many of you have noticed, online ticketing has surcharges, which means you pay more. But the theaters use third party vendors for this, so they don’t see that money, the vendor does.

Now if the argument is that pre-assigned seating will mean lower concessions sales and less advertising (as Rodney keeps insisting) that means a loss in revenue for the theater. To make up for this they only have two options, raise concession prices or raise ticket prices. Neither is good for the consumer. (And it can be argued it isn’t good for the theater either.)

As an added bonus, pre-assigned seating means the theater will have to increase staffing by a huge amount. Depending on the theater size, each one will require at least one usher on call to help people find seats and answer questions or concerns that might arise. The largest theater in my city seats 900 people, which would mean they would need to double or triple their staffing on busy nights to accommodate those crowds. Increased staffing costs means lower profit margins, lower profit margins means once again tickets/concessions need to be raised.

Also, staffing in that amount means an overworked staff which means the quality of service is likely to go down. That is an indirect effect on your movie going experience, and it isn’t a good one.

Other people have noted that pre-assigned seating doesn’t mean that people will respectfully enter the theater at a decent time. It is already a common problem that people attempt to avoid trailers and ads by coming in late to a movie, thus disrupting the feature. Pre-assigned seating not only doesn’t alleviate that, it has the potential to compound it.

If I wanted to get really negative, I could note that pre-assigned seating opens up the movie going experience to the same problems that happen with concert tickets, and that being poachers and scalpers. Though that is highly unlikely.

That all being said, pre-assigned seating certainly has its perks, and in theory could work well. But the amount of infrastructure that needs to be added, both at the physical plant and online, means this is a major cost to theaters that they are unlikely to absorb on their own. That means it has to get passed on to someone, and in all likely hood that is the consumer. I don’t like higher prices, and pre-assigned seating will raise prices. Its up to the individual on whether they think the cost/benefit is enough to go ahead with it.

As an aside, if you are regularly sitting in line 2+ hours to watch a movie you really need to plan better and have no one else to blame but yourself. Mainstream movie theaters do not like sell outs, and as such it is quite easy to find times where the theater will not only not be full, but you won’t have to camp out to see your movie, thus wasting your time. You don’t have to see movies at midnight, nor do you have to see them at 7pm on Saturday. Sundays are great days to see movies, as the attendance drops like a rock. Saturday afternoons are likewise slow, and any time during the week you have no risk of being in a crowded theater, let alone a sell out. Simple common sense and a tiny bit of planning will save you not only hours of time that you would be spending in line, but also save you money.

I do have one question though. So say I spontaneously decide to go to a movie and purchase my ticket at the box office as normal and walk up to get my seat? How do I know which seats are pre-assigned and which ones aren’t? Because it would really suck to be sitting in a seat and then have someone walk up just as the trailers are starting and be like “Actually, I booked these seats weeks ago.” Or, do they have a system where, when you purchase your tickets at the box office or the express box office terminals you choose your seats before you enter the theatre? So you still purchase your tickets as normal, but you still choose your seat to avoid double-bookings while in the actual theatre?

The only time I’ve ever been able to “pre-book” seats (per se) was at Varsity theatre in Toronto, in their VIP rooms. We were doing a double-feature, and when we purchased our tickets at the box office, we had to (not an option otherwise) choose our seats. It worked out great because the movie we saw beforehand ran just 5 minutes before the VIP room movie started, and it was wonderful to walk in and have our seats good to go.

it would be bad for pre selected theatre !!!

I’m 28. But I can still remember 10-12 years ago when I was still in High School. Those teenage years which are highly targeted by movies that drop to a PG-13 rating. Back then, if I wanted to get a group of ten friends together, we would talk about seeing the movie and get our tickets early and meet up to hang out together in line and talk, play our Gameboys, listen to music, etc. We didn’t have one person get all the tickets, most of us couldn’t afford that and, as teenagers, it would be a herculean effort to be organized enough to gather all the money and get the movie tickets in time to make sure we could buy the group of seats together. Additionally, getting the seats ahead of time is hard because some friends were never sure enough of their schedule, so we would get the tickets for the people who could definitely come and the maybes would get them later and join us in line the night of the movie. In the preselected seats, if they were to join in later, there is a very likely chance that they won’t be able to preselect seats next to us because they would be claimed by other strangers. Even today, while I may be master of my domain and schedule, I still have friends who are not as certain of their available time. How do we make this work in a system where we aren’t buying all of our tickets at the same time?

I refuse to stand around forever to guarantee a good seat.

The second reason, is that large crowds of people have a tendency to have more movie-talkers that think they are on their living room couches. So…it’s Tuesday night showings for me. Or even better, an afternoon. Nothing like a mostly empty theater.