Why movie theater seating charts suck
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and certainly don't break it.
My first job was ushering at a 14-screen movie theater. This was in 2014, and by now, it feels crazy to think that a big-chain theater had free-for-all seating that recently. Looking back feels like I lived through the good old days. We’d have lines wrapping around the lobby, which was more like a hotel’s than a movie theater’s, and we had the staff to move them efficiently. We’d help people find seating at big movies, which was often a challenge but still doable without sticking them in the front. A few people ordered tickets in advance, more for big features opening weekend, but it wasn’t really a norm.
You don’t have any of that with a seating chart, and that sucks. I’m not just looking at it for the nostalgia or the benefit of a real-world, human experience. It’s a logistical hurdle that throws a wrench into the moviegoing experience overall.
Sure, if you know exactly where you’re sitting, it’s one less thing to worry about. In my opinion, it’s not a greatly founded worry. I’ve only been stuck in the front row twice in a seating free-for-all: The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Both were clearly happenstance; you don’t pick those two out as the two out of hundreds that would definitely sell out.
I don’t know if all theaters did this, but the one I worked at would only sell to 90% capacity before the showtime, specifically to avoid putting customers in the front row. With seating charts, you can sell to full capacity, but you incentivize customers to choose their seats much earlier. So you’re actually consigning moviegoers to the front row if they don’t order early enough, and fuck if any of us know how early “early enough” is for a particular screening. I’ve seen not-so-big movies sell out in their third week.
I’ve had to sit on the outskirts plenty of times because of this manufactured dilemma, even ordering just hours after tickets go on sale. That particular instance was for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so maybe it’s not the best example, but still. I would much prefer to show up half an hour early and have a fighting chance for a good seat, than wait months to crane my neck for a big action movie.
The only benefit from having a seating chart occurs when you actually get the seat you want, which probably doesn’t account for a big share of the overall. We’re just incentivizing people to order tickets earlier and earlier, with less certainty that they’ll even get the seat they want. You ordered three days ahead to be safe, but some randos ordered a week ahead and took your spot. Go to the theater, come to find the randos actually canceled their reservation, you debate whether to take their seat or just keep sitting where you never wanted to, etc.
This one is a reasonable worry (at least, as long as we’re supposing here that this whole Larry David-ish thought exercise is reasonable). Again, I can only speak to personal experience, but almost every time I’ve reserved a movie in a theater that’s already 30-40% full, I have to compromise my seating preference. It’s not that big of a deal, but it takes away from the experience. The irony is when you’re booking the seat you don’t want well in advance, you have enough time to accept that maybe seating doesn’t really matter.
Then there’s a social dynamic it messes with. I’ll give an example. I went to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith when it was rereleased a few weeks ago. I got there a few minutes early and there was only one other person in the theater — right next to my assigned seat. When I noticed this, I sat at the end of the row instead, maybe five seats away.
It just seems incredibly weird to sit right next to a stranger when there are 90 other seats around you. Either you sit in the most painfully self-aware silence with them or you engage in small talk neither of you wants a part in. It’s like standing right next to someone at a urinal, except there’s 90 urinals and you just have to hope they understand that you’re at your “reserved” urinal. So naturally, you just sit elsewhere.
Being a Star Wars rerelease, the theater soon filled in to the point of being packed. I now had someone else’s seat. I don’t know if one person had to scootch or two or a whole group or what. You can always move back to your assigned seat, but at what point? How do you know you haven’t already screwed somebody over and they haven’t said anything and moving could cause further interference? And why is this something I’d want to think about while the trailers are playing?
Then there are the people who do this on accident. They don’t believe everyone’s treating the seating chart as gospel, so they don’t do it themselves. I call this an accident because I really don’t blame them. There’s also geriatric cases who don’t know any better or easily mix up seat numbers. The inherent flaw with a seating chart system is the theaters have manufactured it themselves; it’s not something people discuss, so there’s not really any etiquette around it. If your auditorium is full enough, it only takes a few of these people to throw off an entire seating chart.
That is to say it’s way too natural for a seating chart to defeat its own purpose.
The core problem here is the idea feels deceptive. Ostensibly, seating charts are supposed to make things more convenient. Maybe that makes people more comfortable going to the movies, because it sounds more appealing, but it doesn’t actually make it more convenient.
It’s a whole lot more convenient for theaters, though. Even on packed days, I don’t see much hubbub at movie theaters anymore. You don’t really have to staff for crowd control when you have seating charts — more people have ordered their tickets well in advance, and they all know exactly where to go.
Maybe this one, singular added simplicity is nice, but at scale, it makes the moviegoing experience feel significantly deader. You’re not so much going to the movies; you’re going to watch a movie and just doing so in public. The cases seating charts don’t stand to get in the way are the cases where they don’t even matter: when you can pretty easily find a seat anyway because the theater’s only 20-30% full. And even then, someone could end up taking the seat you want.