Stranger Things fans face pricey resale tickets for the show finale’s theatrical release
CBC
If you managed to score tickets to watch the Stranger Things finale in theatres on Wednesday or Thursday, count yourself lucky. Plenty of fans are still trying their luck to pick up resale tickets on social media sites, where they’re going for much more than their face value price.
The series finale of the long-running sci-fi show drops on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET on New Year's Eve, in addition to a theatrical release in select theatres across Canada and the United States.
Tickets, which went on sale on Dec. 2 for $11 each, include a concession stand voucher for $11 due to constraints with talent residuals, meaning theatre-goers will ultimately break even on the event purchase.
According to Cineplex, which is hosting many of the Canadian screenings, tickets for the events country-wide sold out “almost immediately."
“A very limited number of seats remain available at select theatres,” Michelle Saba, Cineplex’s vice-president of communications, told CBC News in an emailed statement.
Landmark Cinemas is also showing the finale, and its website shows seats are all or nearly sold out across the country, too.
That’s left fans like Omar Hassanali of Mississauga, Ont., scouring Facebook Marketplace for seats in a theatre.
He said he didn’t learn that the finale was going to air in theatres until a few days after tickets went on sale, and by the time he tried to snag some, there were only a handful available – mostly solo seats or ones close to the screen.
Hassanali’s kids, who are now 13 and 15 years old, have been catching up on the previous seasons now that they’re old enough to enjoy the show with him, and he was hoping they would get to experience the event alongside other excited fans.
“It's also giving the kids that experience ... of looking forward to seeing something epic in the movie theatre,” he said. “If something spectacular happens and everybody is, you know, gasping in shock, it adds something to the experience.”
Most of the resellers have offered him tickets at $50 each. “Some nicer people have [offered] $25 and the most expensive is $200” per ticket, said Hassanali, who was looking for six tickets for his family of four plus two cousins.
As the finale gets closer, some sellers on Facebook Marketplace are dropping their listing prices to the face-value cost, but a number of ads are still listing tickets for $50 each or as high as $100 each, as are ads by people searching for tickets. On Reddit, fans of the show have decried the reselling as “unfair” and some said they’ve been reporting the sellers.
While fans of live music and sports events have come to expect ticket resale for high-profile events, Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute, a non-partisan think-tank, said reselling is somewhat less common for events at the theatre.
Tickets for events like Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film or the Kpop Demon Hunters theatrical release drew big crowds but didn’t sell out in the same way, as there were lots of showings for those releases.
