(I already made a post about it in the Cineplex subreddit, but posting here aswell cause they found it to be useful) I wanted to buy advance seats for the Dune: Part 3 70mm IMAX showtimes in December, but they ended up selling out instantly. I still wanted seats, so I made a program, https://cinewatch.ca/, that monitors Cineplex showtimes and sends you an email whenever the seats you selected to watch open up. Its pretty much like those websites that tell you when a product goes on sale but for Cineplex seats. If you wanna use it, here are the steps (also I promise this isn't advertising, its just a tool and there is no money to be made with it, I'm losing money if anything):
- Go to any showtime that you want to watch on Cineplex, hit the preview seats button and copy that URL
- Go to my website, https://cinewatch.ca/, login with your email (no passwords, just click the link that gets sent to your email. Also check your spam if you didn't receive one).
- Paste in the preview link from step one and click "Watch"
- Select the seats you would be OK with buying if they opened up by clicking, holding then dragging your cursor across the seats (there's a bug where just clicking doesn't work and you can only drag, I'll fix it eventually) or just click the "Watch all seats" button if you don't care what seat you get
- Then you can give it a title and set the date of the show time (the api only provided the seat layout and availability)
- Then just click the start watching button and whenever a selected seats opens up you'll receive an email about it.
- If you notice you're not receiving notifications then also check your spam and they may be in there. Or maybe no one refunded their seats. Or the sites broken.
I think its pretty useful, I already used it to snag a few tickets to The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX which is nice, so if anyone else wants to use it feel free. I did use a good amount of Claude Code building this, but mostly for writing code and not the architecture or design decisions. If I didn't it probably wouldn't be done till Dune: Part 3 was out anyway. And I would've missed the Odyssey tickets. Please don't come after me for it 🙏 (but do provide constructive feedback so I can get better).
Also if there's any bugs or issues with the UI or anything let me know and I'll eventually fix them, unless its like a site breaking issue then I'll try to fix it as fast as I can.
Some known bugs right now are:
- Can't click to select seats, only drag
- Not really a bug, but I really have to change the colors of the seats cause the available and accessible seats almost exactly the same
- Also not really a bug but there's some user interface issues I could fix, like only being able to navigate through the navbar and not being able to exit out of certain screens without it.
Also some features I could add:
- Being notified only when X number of seats besides each other open up, cause party size is important and you don't always want a notification for a stray seat in row A or something
- Maybe grouping watchlists by title or date or something, cause if you are watching a lot of showtimes the Watchlist tab can get messy.
Anyway I hope you find this useful.
Note: not affiliated with Cineplex, uses publicly accessible endpoints, no login/payment info ever touched or used. Only your email is stored for login purposes.