Fandango to acquire MovieTickets.com for an undisclosed amount, gaining access to UK, Canada, and significantly expanding in Latin America
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Context & Ripple Effects
Fandango has been NBCUniversal's roll-up vehicle for movie commerce since its purchase of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster, which brought Warner Bros. in as a minority stakeholder. Buying MovieTickets.com extends that playbook from reviews and content into direct ticketing scale abroad.
The strategic logic compounds over time: by 2020 Fandango added Walmart's Vudu streaming service, and in 2021 FandangoNOW merged with Vudu to become Roku's official movie and TV store. This 2017 ticketing deal is the step that gave the group international box-office reach before the streaming consolidation followed.
First-order effects
- Fandango absorbs its principal domestic ticketing rival, taking over MovieTickets.com's theater partnerships and gaining entry to the UK and Canada plus a significantly larger Latin America presence.
- Warner Bros., already a Fandango minority stakeholder from the Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster deal, gains indirect exposure to the enlarged international ticketing footprint.
Second-order effects
- Exhibitors lose MovieTickets.com as an independent alternative when negotiating ticketing terms, concentrating pricing power further with Fandango across three continents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, movie commerce consolidates under a few conglomerate-owned platforms that span ticketing, reviews, and streaming storefronts — the trajectory the later Vudu acquisition and FandangoNOW merger confirmed rather than contradicted.
The trend: Media conglomerates are rolling up the movie-commerce stack — ticketing, review aggregators, and streaming storefronts — into single owned platforms, with Fandango as the clearest case study.