Muvico FAIL

For the last 6 months or so, whenever I wanted to see a big movie release, I got some sort of flak from Mcpheezy about me wanting to see the movie at the Arclight Theaters. For those of you who don’t live in Los Angeles, the Arclight was designed as “…a complete movie going experience.” With perks such large, comfortable seats, reserved seating, decent food, and digital projectors. Throw in a membership option and special, members-only events (sometimes including guest speakers), and it sounds like exactly the kind of place a Republican elitist would love, but it seemed McPheezy wasn’t feeling it.

In reality, the Arclight ended up being more like the Cheesecake Factory of movie theaters - neither is as exclusive as they make themselves out to be. Sure, the Arclight is more expensive, but (much like the Cheesecake Factory) the cost isn’t prohibitive and (again, like the Cheesecake Factory) it’s generally worth the price increase to an average joe. For 7 years it’s been the top of the theatre food-chain and I’ve been more than satisfied. Enter Muvico.

Muvico is “…a growing chain of premium, megaplex motion picture theaters…” that have “…developed a reputation as true entertainment destinations.” When Muvico announced it was opening a new, state-of-the-art facility out in Thousand Oaks, I was interested to see what they were bringing to the table, but Mcpheezy, he was down-right happy. Thousand Oaks is a wealthy area, and it’s a suburb that’s far enough away from the rest of the city to prevent people from making the trip out there just to see a movie. Those two things combined will probably result in actual exclusivity, to the point where $21 tickets to a theatre that only seats 50 (in plush love-seats no less) might actually make sense.

So while I hadn’t been keeping close tabs on Muvico’s progress out here, I was aware that the theater just opened up this past weekend. Since I work nearby, it’ll actually be very convenient for me to catch movies there if the place turns out to be all it’s cracked up to be, and I’ll admit I’m very excited to see if there really is a noticeable improvement in video quality with Sony’s 4K digital projectors they’ve installed. However, having had my first experience with them yesterday, I already have my doubts.

First things first, Muvico’s site is a perfect example of why you should not have a complete flash site. It’s ugly, it’s gimmicky, and worst of all it’s slow. It seriously looks like some Winamp theme designed back in 2000 by a 13 year old who just learned how to use filters in photoshop (brushed metal and all). So, with my expectations low, I went to buy 10 tickets for me and some buddies to see Watchmen on Friday after work.

The site wouldn’t let me buy them. Despite the theater showing almost no seats as having already been reserved, whenever I tried to select my seat and make a purchase, I was told the seats I had selected were unavailable, but given no further explanation. No matter what showtime or theater I tried, I kept getting the same error. “Fine,” I said to myself “I’ll just call them.”

So I grab the number for the theater and call. The usual recorded greeting was to be expected, but the only option it provided for buying tickets was via the website. When I tried to reach an operator, I was told that no voicemailbox had been set-up for that user, and promptly disconnected.

At that point I was tempted to just reserve seat at the Arclight, since that would take all of about 5 minutes to complete, but a couple of the guys going were only in because of how close Muvico is to our office, so I decided I’d do alittle QA on the Muvico website and see if I could coax it into performing its intended function (to sell tickets).

After alot of fiddling around, I discovered that the site would sell me 1 ticket, or 2 tickets, and sometimes 3 tickets, but 10 was always a no go (despite it being the uppermost option in their own system), and the only time I got it to work with 9 tickets, I had simply been playing around with the site and the seats were nowhere near where I wanted to sit. That’s when my buddy Eric noticed I had selected the seats sequentially from left to right everytime it had worked.

A few more test confirmed Eric’s observation. I could choose seats J1, J2, J3, & J4 and then purchase said tickets, but if I selected seats J2, J3, J4, & J1 I was told the seats could not be purchased. Nevermind the fact that I ended up choosing the exact same seats in both circumstances, the fact that I had chosen them out of sequential order prevented the system from selling them to me, even though the seats were available.

So my method of choosing the center seat in the row I wanted to sit in, and then selecting it and the 4 seats to the right of it, followed by the 4 seats to the left of it was a deal-breaker for their site. I’m not sure how I can express how angry such a stupid mistake on the part of a big company like this makes me. I have to have software QA experience in order to use your site to buy the tickets I want? Fail.

What’s worse, is that the site in question doesn’t just support the new theater. All of the Muvico theaters, some of which have been operating for years use the same site so it’s not like this is a problem specific to the launch of the new theater (which would still qualify for a Fail tag, just not to the same extent). Seriously, no one has complained about this to them? Of course, I didn’t actually have much luck reaching anybody when I was having problems with it, so maybe not.

With their site’s poor performance fresh in my memory, I wasn’t surprised to find an article in the Miami Herald today detailing Muvico’s legal and financial trouble. How can I be surprised that a company which purports to offer ‘…an integrated entertainment experience that is not “just about the movie,”’ but can’t even maintain a website to sell me tickets, can’t even afford to pay their rent?

Tags: Fail, Muvico, Stupid, Watchmen

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Internet, Movies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.