No, AMC Theaters will not ignore its own social distancing guidelines and force strangers to sit next to each other when the cinema chain reopens this week.
That was a wrong assumption that traction obtained on social media when it was revealed that AMC patrons were allowed to buy tickets next to seats that had already been reserved. There’s a reason for that apparent disregard of the six-foot rule apart. AMC’s ticketing engine will automatically have one seat on opposite sides of each party starting Monday, but the technology was not in place when tickets went on sale for the first time last week.
AMC opens its doors to 100 locations on Thursday, but the chain leaves auditoriums only at 30% capacity. That means 70% of the seats will be left empty during each showtime, which will leave more than enough room between patrons, insiders say. It was never intended to force perfect strangers to sit next to a seat previously reserved for someone else. In fact, guests will be mandated to engage in social distance to keep auditoriums free of coronavirus. However, it may mean that there will be rare circumstances where guests do not end up in the seat they select online.
AMC told Variation that in order to ensure that the technology for blocking seats without problems is implemented, the company needed a live environment ticket sales to test the new approach to reservations. It initially planned for a two-week trial run, but after a successful launch, it has determined that the results are satisfactory to roll out the technology to all theaters that accept nationally reserved seats. The rollout to the first wave of theaters should be complete by the beginning of this week.
Tickets for two upcoming upcoming releases, “The New Mutants” and “Tenet,” have not yet gone on sale, and there will be automatic seat blocking for tickets for those shows in auditoriums with reserved seats. AMC hopes that about two-thirds of its approximately 600 locations in the U.S. will operate by Sept. Major markets such as New York and Los Angeles have yet to approve cinemas to reopen to business, leading to the revitalization of the exhibition sector.
