By Zanub Saeed
Tickets for the midnight opening showings of "The Dark Knight Rises," the third installment in Christopher Nolan's Academy-Award-winning Batman franchise, sold out as soon after they were available online through websites like Fandango, but that has not stopped online scalpers from selling the tickets for heavily inflated prices.
Tickets to the IMAX screening of the movie for Friday, July 20th at midnight have gone well up to $100 on websites like Craigslist and eBay, said a new report in ScreenCrush, which can easily be verified by searching both websites. Tickets for the movie itself, when purchased straight from a legitimate venue, should not cost more than $20, and this includes the IMAX tickets for the feature in a big city like New York City or Los Angeles.
Some tickets are being sold to upwards of $150, noted MTV News recently, and a few online sellers are distributing group seat tickets for around $500, said ScreenCrush. Whether or not the tickets are valid remain to be seen, given the dubious nature by which the tickets are being sold in the first place.
This is not the first time the Batman franchise has caused for an illegal redistribution of tickets; in 2008, with the release of the second film of the franchise, "The Dark Knight," starring Christian Bale in the titular role alongside the late Heath Ledger in his Oscar-winning turn as the Joker, IMAX midnight screening tickets were also being scalped online for $100, said ScreenRush.
A representative from Fandango.com, the biggest online selling of movie tickets in the world, told MTV News that their company's policy stood that "any ticket re-sold [was] declared invalid."
The opening midnight regular and IMAX screenings will not be the only ones playing on Thursday, July 19th; Warner Bros., the distribution company behind the Batman saga, will have 3:00am screenings that same night right after the initial showings for those interested, and so far they have not been sold out, noted ScreenCrush. So it is on the film-goers to simply wait a few hours and not spend an extra $100 just to see the final Batman feature.
