Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to use your APIs?

In general terms, the price will vary according to:

  • which of our APIs you would like to use
  • the number of requests you are anticipating
  • which country or countries you require data for
  • the purpose of your end product.

Please complete the form on our Pricing page for further details.

Does the API support ticket bookings?

The API GET purchaseConfirmation provides URL links to cinema web pages.

When you pass cinema_id, film_id, date and time in the Sent Arguments, the response displays a URL which is either:

  • a deep link URL directly to the shopping basket, with the cinema film, date and time already pre-populated (majority of cases)
  • a general link to the now showing page on the cinema’s website (if deep link is not available)

Our API does not support booking or purchasing tickets.   Most cinemas prefer their customers to book directly on their websites or via their own apps, and do not make booking APIs available externally.  If you wish to integrate directly with a cinema, you will need to contact the cinema directly.

Why do you sometimes only have showtimes for 3 or 4 days in advance?

Cinemas plan their weekly schedules from Friday to Thursday.

On a Friday the information will usually be available 7 days ahead. However on a Monday morning it’s likely that there will only be information up to and including Thursday. During the day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we receive updates from every movie theater for the following week (starting Friday). So it may be that we have information for as much as 9 days ahead on a Wednesday.  In general, here are the number of days ahead that showtimes are made available: Monday 4, Tuesday 10, Wednesday 9, Thursday 8, Friday 7, Saturday 6, Sunday 5.

Occassionally film showtimes are made available many weeks ahead for anticipated blockbusters or other popular releases.

Why won’t my API request work?

We usually return a status code with each response (assuming that you are using the correct URL of course).  The status code will indicate the likely cause for the problem.  Please refer to our list of Response Status Codes on our Headers and Responses page.

Can I cache your responses?

You can cache responses on individual clients / devices if the Expires field in the Response header shows a date/time later than the current time. If the date/time is before the current time, then you should not cache the data.

Expires –> Wed, 08 Feb 2020 16:30:00 GMT

You are not allowed to store our data on your own servers.

Why can’t I store data on my own server?

Our terms of use require you to request the data as needed, rather than collect it all once per day, and then store it locally in your own database.  You’re allowed to cache it on end-user’s devices so if they’ve already made the request once, and go back to it in the same session, we don’t force you to re-request the identical data.

We do this to make sure it’s fair to all our customers – the ones that use our data a lot because they have a lot of traffic, pay more than those who only have a small number of users on their site.   If we charged everyone our introductory price and allowed them to store it for unlimited use, we’d be out of business pretty quickly!

There’s a lot of work that goes into ensuring that the APIs are reliable and the data is collected properly – so we think it’s only fair that business pay according to their usage.

Our API’s are very fast, and most respond in less than 500ms, and we’re always working on ways to reduce latency and our availability is usually 100%.

Using our APIs directly means that:

  • You don’t need to create a special database
  • You always get the latest showtimes (we get updates 4-5 times per day)
  • You don’t have to worry about building the business rules and writing new code
  • We take care of the difference between Standard, 3D and IMAX showtimes
  • We only provide upcoming showtimes (old ones are automatically removed from the API)
  • Deep links to movie theaters will always go to the correct booking page (you may send your users to the wrong place if you don’t use the latest data).