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The Marcus Corporation is a leading entertainment and lodging company in the United States. Founded in 1935 by Ben Marcus, the company is headquartered in Ripon, Wisconsin. What began with the opening of a single movie theatre has now grown into a publicly-held company listed on the NYSE.
The Marcus Corporation has two divisions, Marcus Theatres and Marcus Hotels and Resorts. Marcus Theatres currently owns or manages nearly 700 screens at locations in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, North Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska, and one family entertainment center in Wisconsin.
Marcus Cinemas retained us to revamp their website and mobile applications to be compatible with both NCR and Vista ticketing solutions.
For Marcus, the challenge was to integrate two different ticketing solutions into a single website and app. They had been on the NCR ticketing platform and were looking to move to Vista ticketing software to handle box office and concession sales. We had to create a back-end that could work on both these systems and also support migration seamlessly from one system to another for each cinema location. The migration was successfully completed over the course of six months after Go-Live.
The Web Service layer and the custom CMS were built on PHP, with a layered server architecture to balance load while providing security. We had two sources of data — movie data, session data, theatre data were all coming in from two different sets of APIs, thereby resulting in twice the complexity and twice the amount of data to be processed.
We cached data to the maximum extent possible to reduce strain on the POS (NCR or Vista). This allowed us to decentralize the data processing, thereby decreasing the load on the POS servers.
To ensure data integrity, we also created logs with timestamps to ensure the data cached was always up to date.
Foremost in our minds when designing for Marcus Cinemas was to ensure that
the user experienced quick and hassle-free browsing and booking every time. We designed the app to open to a attention-grabbing splash screen that could display a new movie release, announce a special offer or greet customers for a festival.
We went with a dark theme for the apps and used the red and black brand colours.
Instead of showing theatres first — which was the norm in almost all US cinemas — we designed the Marcus Cinemas apps to show a choice of movies first instead of theatres, screens, showtimes or other information.
Influx developed iOS and Android mobile apps for Marcus with a new and upgraded User Interface for better User Experience.
Users can create a profile for themselves on the apps and choose their preferences for theatres, movie-genre and language. This allows the app to customize an experience for the user based on choices.
The app can also pick up the user's location and display movies that are playing in theatres close by. Users can also open an app, chose a theatre and set filter for the genre and language of movies they are in the mood for. The apps allows users to store their Magical Movie Rewards Card (Loyalty) and Gift cards, on the cloud with access to it even whilst on-the-go.
One of the highlights of the Marcus Cinemas apps is that basic information such as barcode and stored card details (Loyalty card and Gift Cards) can still be accessed even when there is weak/no internet connectivity inside theatres. This is done by storing the cards on the user's device, and refreshing the data every time they do have internet connectivity to ensure that the data is valid at all times.
