Tickets for Avengers: Endgame went on sale yesterday and it was a madhouse. Websites crashed due to the demand, but pre-sales still set records on sites like Fandango and Atom. While getting tickets to a screening of Endgame on opening weekend is still very much possible, if you were looking to get a particular seat to a particular show, you might be out of luck. Unless, of course, you're willing to spend some more money. In some cases a lot more money.
Tickets for opening weekend showings of Avengers: Endgame went up on eBay almost as soon as tickets went on sale. Most of the tickets are for theaters in New York or Southern California, but several other theaters are sprinkled throughout the country so you can check to see if somebody from your neck of the woods got the tickets you could not. Some of them go for around $50, a price that's probably five times what the ticket cost, but an amount somebody might be willing to pay for the one time experience of seeing a major movie in the perfect seat. Other tickets are on offer for hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars.
While some of the offers are clearly excessive and aren't likely to garner much interest, some of the more reasonable offers still might. If you really want to be among the first people to see Avengers: Endgame on Thursday night and you don't already have your ticket, there may not be many other options. How often do you get to be in the first group of people to see the finale of an epic film franchise 22 movies long? Maybe that's worth $40 or $50.
If, however, you can wait just a little while, and I would expect many can, you don't need to pay more than face value for tickets. A quick check online shows that, as one example, perfectly reasonable seats at Disney's own El Capitan Theater in Southern California are still available for many showings on opening weekend. You wouldn't be among the very first to see the movie but you can certainly avoid spoilers for a few hours and see it before most.
Of course, the eBay situation certainly spotlights the idea that many believe these tickets will be in extremely high demand to the point that people will pay these prices.
On the one hand, scalpers do provide a service to some. With the issues that many of the ticket selling websites had yesterday, it's very possible that people who made every effort to get tickets early weren't able to do so. While they'll now have to pay a premium, they still get the thing they wanted.
Of course, on the other hand, some of these resellers are clearly trying to take advantage of people with these insane markups. Hopefully nobody will pay four figures for Endgame tickets. That's simply not necessary.
