M+E Daily

LOS ANGELES — For nearly 15 years, Fandango was a name purely synonymous with movie ticketing. And while it’s true that they’re still the go-to for people wanting movie tickets, Fandango is so much more than that today.

“There’s a much bigger opportunity to look at movies as a category, not just ticketing,” Fandango president Paul Yanover said of his company’s recent change in focus, speaking July 18 at the annual Los Angeles Entertainment Summit.

In February, NBC Universal-owned Fandango acquired both Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, from Warner adding 20 million monthly users, and new outlets to not only sell tickets, but also offer end-to-end movie information. The acquisition helped increase traffic to Fandango’s digital portfolio, now attracting 63 million unique visitors per month and garnering more than 100 million app downloads.

And after its January acquisition of Technicolor-and-DreamWorks Animation-owned transactional VOD service M-Go, Fandango rebranded it as FandangoNOW in March, offering up a new premium VOD service, one that fulfills Fandango’s promise to be one-stop shopping for movies, “from discovery to delivery,” Yanover said.

“We knew we wanted to get into transactional home entertainment,” Yanover said. “Consumers can turn to Fandango during any part of a film’s lifecycle, and find some sort of engagement. For people, their relationship with a film is multifaceted. And [our] idea is: ‘How do we serve all those needs?’”

Part of serving those needs will come in the form of “super tickets,” where a fan of a particular franchise can get digital content with their theatrical ticket, including everything from digital ownership of previous films, to bonus features, to exclusive memorabilia. Fandango isn’t looking to be the driver in how windows are done, Yanover stressed. But it will offer consumers what they want.

“We’re going to go to the consumer and say ‘Do you want a want a ticket to ‘Star Trek Beyond [and] do you want to purchase the entire series?” he said. That sort of end-to-end movie offering can keep consumers from just renting content, and bring them back into the ownership mentality, Yanover added.

Yanover also added that Fandango is among the companies looking at riding the augmented reality wave, following the recent success of Pokémon Go. And he reached out to studios, asking them to keep up with the recent industry push for 4K.

“I get why the manufacturers have put their [efforts] into this technology,” he said. “The world is always in upgrade mode, and we all need to keep pace. We should see the 4K/HDR movement as an overall upgrade to the user experience and embrace it.”