Advance ticket sales of “Avengers: Endgame” have broken first-day records — with the demand so great that it caused delays for many would-be purchasers.
Online ticket seller Fandango reported Tuesday that the fourth “Avengers” movie topped its first-day U.S. sales record (previously held by “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) within the first six hours of pre-sales. Advance tickets went on sale on Fandango Tuesday at 5 am PT.
“Avengers: Endgame” also set a new record for the best first day of sales in less than half a day at Atom Tickets, the company said. It has outsold the previous record, set by “Aquaman,” by four times the amount.
AMC Theatres saw its website unable to process orders for several hours, tweeting on Tuesday, “We want everyone to be able to grab their ‘Avengers: Endgame’ tickets, but it looks like we’ve gotten Thanos’ snap. We’re working on getting things back up and running, and in the meantime, please keep trying our website and our partner sites!”
AMC announced around 1:30 pm PT that its site was back up, but noted that its mobile app wasn’t working.
The Alamo Drafthouse chain also posted an apology on its site for delays in purchasing tickets: “We’re so sorry, y’all. If you’re reading this right now, then you probably had a pretty frustrating experience trying to purchase your ‘AVENGERS: ENDGAME’ tickets this morning. We love these movies as passionately as you do, and we hate to see your enthusiasm get tempered by technical problems. Thanks for stickin’ with us. Looks like things are back up and running like normal and we’ve put together a team of IT superheroes to ensure this type of thing doesn’t happen again.”
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“Avengers: Infinity War” set the North American record a year ago for top domestic opening with $257.7 million during April 27-29, topping the 2015 mark held by “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” by nearly $10 million.
“The overwhelming demand is what’s caused this temporary problem,” noted Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with Comscore. “There would not be a problem with a movie that only a few people wanted to see.”
“Avengers: Endgame” stars Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan, Danai Gurira, Bradley Cooper, and Josh Brolin. It’s a direct sequel to “Avengers: Infinity War.” Both were directed by Anthony and Joe Russo.