'The Force Awakens' Breaks Ticket Sales Record

By: Dominic Jones

Turns out a lot people want tickets for Star Wars.  A lot.  Not that it's a surprise to us, but it was a bit of a surprise to online movie ticket retailers - many of whom had their servers crash last night as fan worldwide attempted to buy their tickets for Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens.  Fandango in particular is reporting that the movie sold eight times as many tickets as the previous record hold, The Hunger Games.

Fandango issued a statement saying,

“This is an extraordinary time for the industry, which experienced unprecedented ticketing demand last night for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  The enthusiasm for this year’s most anticipated movie is out of this world and we expect it to continue all the way to its debut on Dec. 18.”

Ticket demand was so intense, that the Alamo Drafthouse issued an apology today to fans who were unable to buy their tickets last night.   Alamo CEO Tim League told fans,

“Last night, we had the single biggest simultaneous surge for movie tickets our industry has ever seen.  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.”

Did you manage to get you The Force Awakens tickets last night?  Or did you have a horror story with the servers crashing?  Let us know in the comments.

Sources: Variety, Entertainment Weekly 

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