Avengers: Endgame crashes ticketing sites, beats advance sales records
The anticipation for the final instalment of Marvel's Infinity War saga proved too much to handle - for both fans and cinema operators.
The demand for the tickets to Avengers: Endgame was so high that cinema operators Golden Village (GV), Cathay, Shaw and Filmgarde saw their websites crash as soon as ticket sales went live at 9.30am yesterday.
Avid Marvel fan Miss Natalie Teo, 19, told The New Paper that she had never felt so stressed out in her life.
The Nanyang Polytechnic student: "I was told of cinema websites in the United States crashed when my friends there tried to book tickets. I never expected that to happen here in Singapore."
She added: "Some of us were put in waiting lines for over four hours, and it was terrifying."
Advance ticket sales for Avengers: Endgame began on April 2 in the US and they experienced similar issues with AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., the largest movie chain in the US, crashing, and Fandango and Atom Tickets, top ticket suppliers, struggling to keep up with demand as it surpassed their first-hour and first-day sales records.
For Miss Goo Wey Charmaine, 19, a Temasek Polytechnic student and long-time Marvel fan, her quest for Endgame tickets started at 7pm on April 9 where she "camped out" at both Shaw and GV websites.
She told TNP: "On GV, I could hardly go from one step to another without getting an error page. And before I could even access the advanced booking tabs, the booking had already timed out.
Over at Shaw's website, Miss Goo said her queue number for the IMAX tickets was at around 4,000. She managed to get non-IMAX tickets at 10.45am.
GV reportedly sold over 15,000 tickets in the first hour.
QUEUE SYSTEM
Shaw Theatres used a queue system which saw over 40,000 people in the queue by noon yesterday.
A spokesman for Shaw said: "We activated our queue system for public access to our website and online booking system for all movie titles including Avengers: Endgame.
"This is to help us better manage the extraordinarily high volume of traffic to our site as we have fans of both the series as well as the IMAX format."
Much like popular concert tickets, it did not take much time for Avengers: Endgame tickets to appear on online marketplaces like Carousell, offering tickets at inflated prices, ranging from $62 to a $500 per ticket.
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