The Apps That Ate the Multiplex: How Theater Chains Lost the Plot on Mobile

Written By Ian Maisel

It starts with a tap. You open a theater app to watch a trailer or grab a seat for that neon-drenched A24 drama everyone is whispering about. But instead of a moment of anticipation, you are met with a loyalty pitch, a points prompt, and an interface so committed to clutter that it forgets the one thing it’s supposed to be selling: the movie.

As part of my Google UX Design Professional Certificate, I conducted a competitive audit of the flagship movie-ticket apps from AMC, Regal, Cinemark, and Fandango. The goal was to evaluate how well they function as extensions of the moviegoing experience, as digital lobbies for a cultural ritual that relies on emotion, clarity, and fun. These apps aren’t broken, they’re just deeply un-cinematic.

AMC’s app has polish. Its poster grid is clean, its A-List integration works, and it knows exactly who it’s speaking to: Gen Z and millennial format chasers, Dolby loyalists and movie-goers who love their heated reclining seats. But the user experience is clunky, cluttered with trailers that may not be playing in your market and confusing user flows that require several clicks to navigate between previews and finding showtimes at your local theater. And the final insult is that after you buy a ticket, you’re offered flavorless irrelevant promotions for SiriusXM and Disney+ subscriptions instead of articles or features to get you excited about seeing the movie. Curb your enthusiasm for Tom Cruise: we’ve got more co-branded corporate products to shill.

Regal’s app is a maze with a giant dead spot in the middle of the home screen. It wants to do everything – highlight the hot movie of the week, sell its subscription plan, and sell you Smurfs toys – all at once, and without any discernible hierarchy. There’s a giant dead spot in the middle of the home screen, and the text size varies in every section.

Cinemark’s app is, in many ways, the most conservative. It’s built around a low-expectations subscription plan: one ticket a month, concessions discount, and online fee waivers. It targets families and middle-American moviegoers who want predictability. But the design language is chaotic, mixing illustrations and icons like a high-school sophomore learning Photoshop for the first time.

And then there’s Fandango, which, as an independent ticketing marketplace, should be the most nimble of the bunch. It isn’t. The whole interface is crowded, flat, and confusingly redundant with three links to the same trailer on the same page. It is, in effect, a shopping cart without a story.

Across all four apps, the same problems appear. Information is buried. Navigation is cluttered. The tone is off. The design prioritizes loyalty programs and upsells over emotional engagement. None of the apps treat accessibility as central. And crucially, none of them start with the trailer: the one thing that reliably turns maybe into yes.

There is a better way forward.

The homepage should feel like a marquee. Trailers should auto-play in a vertical scroll. Navigation should be clean, like a Netflix or Amazon Prime scroll, with accessibility as a strength. The layout should rely on clean visual tiles with clear calls to action. And hey, why not include articles and video shorts about the films?

And then there’s the matter of loyalty. The existing programs reward volume - watch a dozen movies a month by yourself! But people go to the movies for connection. A better model? How about two tickets a week for you and a date? A monthly $5 concession credit toward a $10 spend? A digital subscription to Entertainment Weekly or Variety? Something for people who love movies and want to share the experience with their friends and family.

The app should feel like the first scene in the movie, not the receipt at the end of it. Right now, the industry is designing ticket platforms like they’re selling gym memberships. What they’re really selling is magic. It’s time to make that visible, from the very first tap.

Ian Maisel

When I was in high school I worked as a movie theater projectionist, acted in my school plays, and published a series of autobiographical comic books that I sold at music and bookstores. I’ve always loved entertainment, and at Brown University I double majored in Visual Arts and Modern European History because the history teachers told the best stories.

My career began at an artificial intelligence startup company where I worked as a graphic designer and animator creating 3D avatars for virtual personalities. I used a program called Poser that was kind of like a Barbie Dream House for cartoons. My comic illustrations were published in the international edition of Time magazine.

In 2006, I completed a graduate Certificate of Publishing and Communications at Harvard University, where I studied creative writing, acting, and media production. I auditioned for the student theater and was cast in a high-brow Chekhov play and a low-brow undergraduate comedy where I played a California high school guitarist like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

At Boston College I continued developing my career as a graphic designer and went on to work as an animator at a Jewish nonprofit. In 2008 I left Boston to chase the California dream. I got a job in San Francisco as a litigation graphics specialist for intellectual property attorneys, and I worked on some high-stakes legal trials where I barely slept for a week!

After five years I transitioned into the corporate world and worked as a contract presentation designer at Visa and Bare Minerals. I enjoyed collaborating with senior executives to bring their ideas to life through graphic storytelling and large-scale event presentations. One of my highlights was getting to opportunity to produce an in-house interview with the supermodel Christy Turlington!

In 2017 I took on my first Senior Designer role at Alexandria Real Estate, where I designed high-end investor presentations and art directed photoshoots for major tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. The following year I flew out to LA to study video production, and went on to create a digital signage content management system for Alexandria’s 60+ high-tech office buildings across the country.

In 2020 I expanded my focus into social media by producing a video advertising campaign that launched a Visa executive’s speaking career by generating 30,000 social media engagements in five months. Since then I’ve continued designing creative presentations, producing videos, and writing social media campaigns for a wide range of brands including the University of San Francisco and Meta. I love working with high-performance creative teams on exciting projects and enjoy utilizing my creative background to work at the intersection of design, entertainment, and culture.

https://www.ianmaisel.com
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