ok so if you tried to grab tickets for anything big this summer, Dune 3 in IMAX 70mm, The Odyssey, basically any event screening, you already know. The showtimes sell out in minutes. The AMC app crumbles under the load. And then, like clockwork, the seats show up on resale sites for triple the price. Slate has a piece breaking down the whole mess and it confirms what we've all been living through: getting into a theater for the big stuff has turned into a bloodbath.

It's basically the Taylor Swift Eras Tour playbook but for movies now. Limited IMAX 70mm prints means limited showings means limited seats, and everyone who spent three years hearing "theaters are dead" apparently showed up at the exact same time. The demand is genuinely great news, I'm not gonna pretend otherwise, packed houses for Dune 3 is my grandmother's whole "the tech enables the culture" thesis in action. But the experience of buying the ticket? straight up broken.

The part that drives me nuts is this. Theaters spent years begging people to come back, and now that we ARE back, the buying system treats every big release like a sneaker drop. You have to be online before the on-sale time, refreshing, praying the app doesn't boot you into a queue that moves one person per minute. And if you slip, a bot already got there and the seat is on a resale site before you've finished saying a bad word.

And the 70mm thing specifically is its own beast. There are only so many actual film prints in existence. Nolan movies made shooting on film cool again (thank you, you exhausting three-hour king, Dante is nodding somewhere), but physical prints don't scale like digital files. So you get this scarcity that's real, not manufactured, and scarcity plus a broken purchasing pipeline equals exactly what we're seeing. People camping on apps for a Tuesday 10pm showing two towns over.

I don't have a clean solution and, real talk, the chains don't seem to either. Better queue systems exist, verified fan-style presales exist, cracking down on bot resale exists. None of it is being done at the scale this summer demanded.

Anyway. I saw a guy on TikTok who bought Dune 3 tickets for six different showings as "insurance" and I both despise and deeply understand him. That's where we're at culturally. Good luck out there.