How to get good seats at the movies

This is obvious, but to generate hype, most big movies will have a “presale” a few months before the movie releases. This is usually accompanied by a second or third trailer that ends with “tickets on sale now.”

It’s sometimes annoying because big movies will crash the apps, and nobody has time for this.

What we are all actually interested in is getting seats to good movies after the best seats from this first run sell out.

A theme you’ll find throughout this article is that we are often played by the marketers for a movie. Movies will go “on sale” months in advance to generate hype. But look closer—only a few showtimes actually go on sale.

It makes sense. Exhibitors don’t know exactly what demand a given movie will have, so they are incentivized to open the minimum number of showtimes in advance. They wait as long as possible, until they have a good enough signal, before finalizing showtimes for their theaters.

For a presale, they will often open PLF screens (Premium Large Format, like IMAX and Dolby), and maybe one or two auditoriums’ worth of standard showtimes, depending on the theater.

So early on any given week—usually on Tuesday—exhibitors will have enough box-office information to finalize showtimes for the upcoming weekend. Once finalized, they’ll usually open new showtimes for all movies! So what you might find if you look on Tuesday is an empty 8:00 pm showtime next to a 7:30 pm showtime that sold out months ago.

For example, as of the time of writing, Avengers: Doomsday has only a few standard auditoriums assigned to it. Surely more auditoriums will be playing Avengers: Doomsday. I’d bet most auditoriums will be assigned to play it when the movie comes out, December 17.

There are a few exceptions to this rule

• PLF screens are usually committed further in advance. There is less discretion theaters can take with them, though sometimes there is wiggle room. The End of Oak Street never really launched in IMAX even though it was supposed to, and Spider-Man took some IMAX screens from The Odyssey on Spider-Man’s second weekend. But by the week of a movie’s release, the PLF screens are likely locked.
• Small movies launching in limited release. These are usually smaller, often Oscar-bait movies like Marty Supreme or The Brutalist. The strategy concentrates them in hot markets like LA and NYC, where sold-out screenings can generate buzz for a movie that is a bit of an underdog at the box office. Ironically, this is similar to what big-budget studios are doing with IMAX 70mm, but I digress. Don’t expect random showtimes to pop up during the limited run. Once they go wide, however, they tend to follow the patterns of other movies.

This is easy to check manually, but I also built a new showtime tracker that lets you set up alerts for when this drop happens.

While we can consistently rely on the early-in-the-week showtime drop for regular theaters, I’ve noticed AMC might randomly add more screenings for hot movies before release. So far, I’ve noticed this phenomenon only with PLF screens.

For example, I was checking the AMC app on June 10, 2026, and I noticed there was a new 10:45 pm opening-night 70mm IMAX showtime for The Odyssey. I opened it, and there were plenty of seats! Mind you, The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX had been completely sold out for weeks at this point. AMC had just randomly opened this showtime.

And I noticed this phenomenon for other movies too. Avengers: Doomsday opened a midnight, opening-night Dolby showing at my local AMC weeks after the presale. Dune: Part 3 got another Dolby screening a day after the presale.

These drops are great because you never really have to compete with an army of presale moviegoers. Albeit, the crowd won’t be as special.

You can sorta smell when this will happen too. As of the time of writing, Dune: Part 3 has the following showtimes at AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco:

It feels like there could be more IMAX showtimes on Monday the 14th and Tuesday the 15th. It also feels like Thursday the 17th could fit in another IMAX showtime or two!

Again, my new showtime tracker will alert you if another screening drops.

If you made it this far, you’ve made it to my favorite method: waiting for a refund.

A well-known secret among AMC A-Listers is that there are a lot of cancellations at AMC theaters. Because an A-List reservation has no additional per-ticket cost, people can reserve speculatively and cancel when their plans change.

And even beyond A-List, some event movies are putting tickets on sale many months in advance. Lots of people can have their plans change. Family visits, work, and more important things come up.

For basically all showtimes, roughly 10% of seats will eventually get refunded. And about a third of those (3.33% of all seats), will get refunded within the hour of a movie starting.

So with any sizable theater, simply refreshing within the last hour before a showtime will likely give you a shot at seats. For the longest time, this is how I saw basically every movie. Sometimes I’d refresh on the way to a sold-out showtime.

And if you’re really ballsy, roughly 0.4% of seats reopened after a movie’s listed start time. Remember, movies often have about 20–25 minutes of previews these days. Those seats can go unsold, and they help explain why even sold-out movies sometimes have empty seats.

But this can be risky. This is a well-known enough strategy that it doesn’t work for all showtimes. When I saw The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, I saw a line of people refreshing the app outside the theater, hoping to snag a refund.

And I remember opening night of Project Hail Mary in 70mm. I was in an Uber expecting to snag some last-minute cancellations. I’d see one, then it would disappear. I’d see another, and it would disappear immediately. Luckily, I got a pair, but I had competitors xD.

For more normal movies that don’t have as much demand, there are fewer people using this strategy, and it’s pretty common to find some prime seats available 20 minutes before a movie starts.

Desperately refreshing the AMC app might work. But nobody has time for this.

This is partly why I created the app. You can get notified when a seat reopens. Better yet, on paid tiers and eligible showtimes, instead of only sending a notification, The Movie Watch can put those seats into an AMC checkout and give you a private opportunity to claim the link.

I built this “Seat Claim Checkout” system for two reasons. First, to combat scalpers: every user is limited to two claimed links per account, per movie. And second, so my users don’t have to compete with one another over seats that aren’t guaranteed.

Claiming a link gives you a short, exclusive opportunity to finish the held checkout on AMC’s site. The final purchase still happens with AMC, but you’re no longer racing every person who received the same alert.

And so far it works pretty well! For Dune: Part 3, I've had numerous opportunities to get opening night tickets by just setting up some trackers.