Introduction
This article will cover the steps required to create a movie marathon in INDY.
Points to note before starting; marathons can only take place in one screen at a time, and, films in a marathon must be sequential (i.e back-to-back).
Creating a Marathon Movie
A marathon must be made up of movies already added to your site's movie library. For this example I'll use the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer and will create the famous "Barbenheimer" as the marathon.
You create the marathon as it's own movie, and use the marathon movie section within it to tie the two films(or more) together. The films must be added in the order that they will screen:
You can then schedule the marathon as required in Booking Weeks:
Seating Allocations in Marathon Movies
The next consideration is how you will sell tickets for a Marathon Movie. You might only want people to be able to buy tickets for both films and attend the full event, OR, you may want to offer people the choice to book tickets for just one of the films in the marathon. INDY allows you to do both.
i. For allocated seating
Your first need to decide how many seats you want to set aside for customers who will be watching the entirity of a marathon, if you intend to only sell seats for the full event select all your seating capacity for the screen. If not, then select a sub-section of seats. You do this by selecting the seats in your seat chart, and then, defining them to Reserve During Marathons.
This means that only customers who buy tickets for the entire event can book those seats.
ii. For unallocated seating
The process is much the same, however you specify the number of marathon seats in Screen settings instead, essentially blocking out a number of seats for customers who will buy a ticket for the entire marathon:
Putting Tickets Onsale
There are some final steps to check off before putting a marathon onsale. If we go back to booking weeks and double click on the showing, we can access the showing's settings which is where we can access overrides:
You will see you can now override certain conditions for the entire marathon and also its composite showings.
If you select Showings, you can edit the properties for both of the individual films within the marathon, and most importantly set them up to "allow individual sales" - this means in my example that people can buy tickets for Barbenheimer, or Barbie or Oppenheimer:
The end result, as can be seen below, is that on your customer facing website, customers can decide to buy a ticket for the full event, or, they can select a ticket for either of the two films they want to see individually - with the second film's start time beginning from the end of the first movie:
🔔 Important things to note
1. When you first create your marathon movie, you will be forced by the system to enter a runtime, this is not overriden when you add the composite films into the marathon settings, so be mindful you will need to manually override this to reflect the actual runtime. (you can see the example above that Barbenheimer has a 4hr runtime, when it is actually in excess of 5hrs).
2. Set up your seating before putting the marathon onsale, it's important this is done prior to the film going live, especially if you want to offer the flexibility to choose films within a marathon to watch and not just the entire event.
3. Box Office Reports will split marathon ticket revenue evenly across each movie in the marathon.
Internal ticket sales reports will operate on direct ticket sales only (tickets sold to the marathon will report against the marathon, tickets sold to an individual showing will report on that individual showing). Occupancy accounts for all tickets in a showing, not just ticket sales.
4. Another consideration for marathons is intervals, if you want to schedule a break between films, you should do so by editing the Showings settings in Booking Weeks and specifically editing the Post-Start Time Buffer - this will extend the runtime of the first movie, and allow you time to give your audience a short break between films:
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