Theater Chain Calls Star Wars: The Force Awakens The Single Biggest Simultaneous Surge For Movie Tickets Ever

Following last night's online box office implosion with Star Wars: The Force Awakens tickets [...]

By Brandon Davis

Following last night's online box office implosion with Star Wars: The Force Awakens tickets going on sale, a Texas-based theater chain, Alamo Drafthouse has released a statement regarding the wild night.

"Last night, we had the single biggest simultaneous surge for movie tickets our industry has ever seen," says Alamo CEO Tim League. "The great news is that Star Wars fandom is as strong as ever. Unfortunately, that surge exposed weaknesses in our ticketing infrastructure, and that of Fandango, Regal, AMC and Cinemark, not to mention other exhibitors across the globe who also crashed. But that is not a good enough excuse. The Alamo Drafthouse has been preparing for this hugely important day for the past nine months, and we thought we were ready. We spun up 40 simultaneous servers and were monitoring the load to instantaneously add more if needed. We hosted our static pages in a state-of-the-art cloud environment that could also instantaneously expand with demand. The massive onslaught of simultaneous users, however, exposed an unforeseen flaw in the ticketing infrastructure itself that we were unable to fix on the fly."

"We tried to be ready for this hugely important day, and we missed the mark," League continued. "In the moment, we tried to react as quickly as possible. We transitioned our sales to Fandango as soon as they were up and running again themselves. We apologize for making what was supposed to be a joyous day a big hassle for Star Wars fans. We commit to doing better in the future."

Alamo Drafthouse is the same theater which was first to show The Interview on Christmas Day last year. It's fitting that they are also the first chain to speak up about the online box office crash.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters December 18, 2015.

Trending Now: