| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2005 |
| Headquarters | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, United States |
| Services | Online media |
| Owner(s) | NBCUniversal [1] |
| Employees | 500 |
| Website | Fandango.com |
Fandango is a corporation in the United States that sells movie tickets over the telephone and Internet, enabling customers to ensure ticket availability and avoid lines at the movie theater.
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Fandango charges a premium to use its services, ranging from 75¢ to $2.00 (the additional surcharge for phone orders), which reserves a ticket to be printed out upon arrival at a movie theater, thereby avoiding lines. Initially, seating was promised for sold-out shows, but this feature was discontinued for most theaters, as not all were equipped to handle reserved seating and will call lines. With ticket prices in many areas exceeding US$10.00, purchasing tickets through Fandango and other ticketing websites can make movie-going an expensive proposition; however, procuring tickets to movies on their opening days by conventional means may be inconvenient, difficult, and at times impossible (especially in large metropolitan areas) without utilizing services like Fandango.
Fandango's advertisements play before previews at participating movie-theater chains and feature lunch bag puppets spewing various one- or two-line jokes and riddles centering around the company's name. They have also done a segment that is based on "We are the World".
Fandango's website also offers movie descriptions, movie reviews by members, and some web-based games.
Industry revenue increased rapidly for several years after the company's formation. However, as the Internet grew in popularity, small- and medium-sized movie-theater chains began to offer independent ticket sale capabilities through their own websites. In addition, a new paradigm of moviegoers printing their own tickets at home (with barcodes to be scanned at the theater) emerged, in services offered by PrintTixUSA and by point-of-sale software vendor operated web sites like "ticketmakers.com" (and eventually Fandango itself). Finally, an overall slump in moviegoing continued into the 2000s, as home theaters, DVDs, and high definition televisions proliferated in average households, turning the home into the preferred place to screen films.
On April 11, 2007, Comcast acquired Fandango, with plans to integrate it into a new entertainment website called "Fancast.com," set to launch the summer of 2007.[2] In June 2008, the domain Movies.com was acquired from Disney.[3] With the company's purchase of a stake in NBCUniversal in January 2011, Fandango and all other Comcast media assets were merged into the company.
Fandango is one of two major online advance movie ticket sale sites, along with MovieTickets.com. Before being acquired by Comcast in April 2007, Fandango was privately owned, with the major shareholder being the largest movie-theater chain in the U.S., Regal Entertainment Group, including the United Artists and Hoyts theater chains. Along with other partners, Regal founded Fandango partly to prevent the older MovieTickets.com from establishing a monopoly on phone and online ticketing services. (MovieTickets.com is publicly owned and trades under the stock symbol HOLL.) At Regal's acquisition of Consolidated Theatres, that chain was under contract to MovieTickets.com. As such Fandango does not ticket those Regal theaters.
Although Fandango does not provide online ticketing for many AMC Theaters, it does provide online ticketing for those AMC Theaters originally part of the Loews Cineplex Entertainment chain, due to contractual obligations in place prior to the 2005 merger of the two movie chains.[4] Loews had previously attempted to break the contract in 2002 under pressure of bankruptcy and from (then) AOL Moviefone; Fandango successfully sued both Loews and Moviefone and retains Loews business.[5]
On September 5, 2011 AMC Theatres announced internally that it is discontinuing use of Fandango and is switching to MovieTickets.com for all of its theatres.
In July 2009 it was revealed that Fandango along with other web sites including buy.com and Orbitz were linked with controversial Web loyalty programs, also known as post-transaction marketers. Fandango reportedly gave access to their customers' credit cards to the third party.[6]