One of the founders of the movie ticketing service Fandango has died after an apparent suicide in New York.
J. Michael Cline, co-founder of the movie ticket website and service Fandango, died Tuesday after falling from a Manhattan hotel balcony. The New York Times.
Cline co-founded Fandango with former chief operating officer Art Levitt in 2000 during the dot-com boom and grew it into one of the largest online retailers. Fandango, according to him, started with a chain of seven movie theaters Diversity.
Fandango succeeded by completely changing the way people went to the movies. Moviegoers didn’t have to wait in long ticket lines only to find out that the 6:00 p.m. screening was on Battlefield Earth it was already sold. They could buy their tickets before leaving home and still have time to buy an overpriced case of Milk Dudu and a watery Shasta.
The company’s bright orange “F” logo has made it one of the most recognizable online brands in the industry. Cline described the whimsical-sounding name of his company Diversity as “fast and fun” and “the perfect fit for a service designed to make going to the movies easier and more enjoyable than ever.”
Five years after its launch, online movie ticket sites like Fandango and its competitor Movietickets.com It sold more than 30 million dollars in tickets in a year. Comcast Fandango bought the brand in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Fandango has also bought some of the Internet’s hottest movie properties, such as the general movie review website Rotten Tomatoes In 2017. The movie ticket brand went through subsequent parent sales until it landed current owners NBCUniveral and Warner Bros., who expanded the Fandango brand into a streaming service called Fandango at Home as a replacement for Vudu.
Fandango continues to thrive as an online ticket seller even as movie theaters experience a steep decline in sales. During Barbenheimer crazy last summer Fandango sold 3.5 million tickets only films that have been nominated and won Oscars Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Cline left Fandango in 2011 to become executive chairman of tech investment firm Juxtapose, which helped found health and wellness companies like Care/of and Corduroy. the firm’s website.
Levitt described his former business partner New York Times as a formidable entrepreneur who is “a bit adventurous” and someone who “saw an opportunity in the market” with Fandango.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US is 1-800-273-8255 or you can simply dial 988. The Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada) or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia protects list of crisis lines for people outside those countries.
