HOUSE OF LUNARIUM | L.A.W: October 2011

Sometimes even a city that never sleeps needs to kick back, relax, and have a movie night. You may come to find, however, that it’s not always as easy as it sounds. For some odd reason, Fandango and Movie Tickets are trying to send you to a theatre across town to catch your film.

There’s a reason for this. As egregious as it seems, both websites have exclusive contracts with certain theatre chains. This basically means that they don’t carry tickets for the competition, nor do they even want you seeing competing theaters playing the film you’re searching for. Making matters worse, all the popular film websites out there (Rotten Tomatoes, Flixter, Moviefone, etc) are all exclusively allied with either Fandango or MovieTickets and hide competing theaters.

No longer will this be an issue. L.A.W. presents to you, FilmBot.com

FilmBot is a movie theatre service that transcends mediocrity. Independently owned, there are no contracts in place limiting your viewing experience.

Utilizing Google Maps, FilmBot shows you all the theaters screening the film you want to see, and allows you to buy tickets to the screening (kind of like Kayak for moviegoing). There’s also a nifty integration of the Rotten Tomatoes score, New York Times review, and trailer for every film currently screening in New York City, from the most indie to the most mainstream, so you down have to hunt these down elsewhere.

Living in the age of social networking, it is also important to have some semblance of functionality in that realm nowadays. Using FilmBot, you can compare and contrast the cinematic taste of your FilmBot friends, even adjusting how much you trust each friend’s film taste from 0% to 100% on an innovative feature called the Trustometer. After the site tallies scores given by those you trust most, the film is assigned a projected FilmBot score to help you determine whether or not it’s worth a viewing.This is truly a totally new kind of recommendation system, and by being able to see which friends of yours want to see a given movie, you don’t have to call up ten different friends to find out who wants to go with you.

Easily the most unique feature, and possibly the best, you are able to “build your bot” upon sign-up. You select up to four genres in film, that construct the head, body, and arms of the bot, which will also serve as your avatar. There are over half a million combinations of FilmBots and the first 100 moviegoers to activate 25 FilmBot friends, win a Gold head for their FilmBot.

While exclusive to New York City for the initial launch, its creator has told us that they are currently in the process of expanding into all the major cities in the states (as well as developing the iPhone app). Having played with the site’s functionality and seen how effectively it works while keeping searching fun, we simply cannot wait for this expansion to take place.

Jessie Dennis.

Watch the Demo Video!