AMC cinemas to block space between reserved seats on Monday

No, AMC Theaters isn’t going to ignore its own social distancing guidelines and force strangers to sit next to each other when the movie chain reopens this week.

It was a mistaken assumption that gain territory on social media when it was revealed that AMC allowed customers to purchase tickets alongside seats already reserved. There is a reason for this apparent disregard of the six-foot-apart rule. AMC’s ticketing engine will automatically block a seat on either side of every party starting Monday, but the technology wasn’t in place when tickets began going on sale last week.

AMC opens 100 locations on Thursday, but the chain will only allow auditoriums at 30 percent capacity. That means 70 percent of the seats will be left empty at any time during the show, leaving more than enough room between patrons, according to insiders. There had never been any intention of forcing complete strangers to sit next to a seat that had previously been reserved for someone else. In fact, guests will be mandated to engage in social distancing to keep auditoriums free from coronavirus. This may, however, mean that there will be rare circumstances where guests will not end up in the seat they have selected online.

AMC said Variety that to ensure the smooth implementation of the seat-locking technology, the company needed a live ticket sales environment to test the new approach to reservations. It had initially scheduled a two-week trial period, but after a successful launch, it determined that the results were satisfactory to deploy the technology to all theaters accepting reserved seats across the country. The deployment in the first wave of rooms should be completed early in the week.

Tickets for two major upcoming releases, “The New Mutants” and “Tenet”, are not on sale yet, and there will be an automatic seat blocking for tickets to these shows in reserved auditoriums. AMC hopes that about two-thirds of its roughly 600 locations across the United States will be operational by September 3. the exhibition industry.