OK, some people might like it. But my wife and I, who love movies and have been using IMDB from nearly the beginning, hate it.
IMDB used to let us easily print out a nice, clean list of all the movies playing at a theater. All text, so if the train got delayed, we could easily look at this listing and change our plans.
Well, some committee, who apparently decided that being able to put all the films playing at AMC’s River East 21, and all the times, on one sheet of paper with space for the nearby AMC 600. As far as I can tell, they took money under the table from HP because the whole page is now covered with posters of movies, guaranteeing that any listings printed out will consume as much expensive color ink as possible.
Since IMDB is now worthless, what movie listing sites still print out well?
You still print listings? hahahahaha! OK I’m sorry. First, don’t print in color if you don’t have to, change your printer settings to print in grayscale and on draft mode. That was helpful for the dark days when I would print off Google map directions. Second, I like fandango.com for their movie listings. All the text is small but readable, and you can copy and paste the text into a notepad document to print it if you like.
Not everyone wants to spend the money to have a smart phone to look up theater listings on the run when a $.05 piece of paper has all the information. Appropriate technology.
Try Flixster, maybe. I only ever access it from my smartphone, so I’m not sure how good the printability is, but they have up-to-date theater listings.
You get movie listings from IMDB? I would never have thought of that.
I use Yahoo!, which still lists the movies and showtimes as text. You can hover over the movie title to get the poster to pop up, but the main listing is text.
Yeah that’s pretty bad. I haven’t been to their listings page in awhile so this is the first time I’ve seen the change and it sucks and I will not be using it anymore. I go to the theater closest to me so I only check their listings. I’m not going to play guessing games that a particular movie is playing at my theater.
And just to be thorough I clicked on the posters of two movies I would like to see someday and neither one is playing at my theater. A waste of time.
It looked like it was designed by people who rarely go out to the movies. And when they do, they don’t care which of the dozen multiplexes they drive to. It has been rendered useless to those of us who live in an urban environment and take public transit who need to see what is playing at a specific theater.
Even worse, they only have “Theaters Near You” and appear to have deleted the vastly more useful self-selected list of theaters I had before. For instance, from my home in Chicago, there are several theaters that are within five miles of my home that are impossible to get to. They are out in the burbs, and I’d have to take the L downtown, transfer to the Metra, then take a Pace bus. The River East 21 is not “near” but easy to get to at any time of the evening.
This is what happens when the California Car Culture re-designs things to make it “better” for the rest of us. Somebody seriously need a hard kick in the balls for this one.
Use http://www.movietickets.com/. I’ve never printed out their listings (never had a need for that) but it seems like it’d be pretty simple to do so, as they just give a list of what’s playing at what theater.
My advice is sound. When I look up movies to watch, I go for the theater closest to me, not all movies playing everywhere. There’s no sense looking for movies I want to see if the only theater is too far away. So you know, I looked up movie listings on IMDB before I posted and it looked like this.
So I tried it out. When I go to IMDB and select showtimes, I get this:
That’s a page full of posters for the different movies, no clue where they are playing, much less times.
There’s a “Theaters Near You” list on the right. It lists “within 5 miles”, which is within 5 miles of somewhere in Houston, but not me. “Within 10 miles” ditto.
Within 20 miles lists two I visit, but still not the closest to me.
Oh look, there’s a set location field at the top. Enter ZIP
Okay, yes it lists them geographically for that ZIP. Not sure how that helps the urban dweller who needs easy mass transit access vs geographic closeness.
Now I have to pick the theater I want off that list. Pick one, get that list, with the posters embedded so it takes 5 pages to print out the full list. But what if I want to compare vs a different theater? Now I have to go print that list. Another 5 pages.
Okay, not impossible, but not convenient by any means, and certainly worse than before (by description provided). Apparently you need to know a zip code near the theater you want to be able to get it in the list to pick.
Exactly, thank you. And some of these theaters are special occasion only, like the French Consulate which plays French films once or twice a month. And some of the theaters I can get to are nowhere near each other, like the Century in Evanston - not “close” but a single bus ride 1/2 block from my apartment to right in front of the theater.
These jerks took something that worked well and utterly broke it.
Right, the Car Culture thinks that everything in the same zip code is “close”. I don’t think of the zip code of any place unless I’m mailing them something - I think of bus and train routes.
…or just swear off IMDB’s movie listings.
Why is “Web 2.0” constantly giving us worse web experiences?
I don’t really get “the why” of it. I get that you would rather decide en route, but don’t you narrow your choices just by the films you’d prefer to see? I’m lucky if there’s two movies out at once that I want to see, and I love movies. If I were in your shoes, sans smartphone, I honestly would just glance at the movie times for the one maybe two movies I was interested in. I might glance at the times for a different theater if I knew I was going to be X blocks from my usual. They show a half hour of commercial and previews, so I don’t even need to memorize the times. I want see Thor after dinner, and I remembered that it’s at this theater and starts at 7ish.
I’ll even grant that it is dumb that a site would harm its own useful simplicity, I just don’t see a need for a master list of all this information when one’s tastes already dictate most of the options. Isn’t this info already in a printed and portable version from the Trib?
It was mentioned before, but Google’s Showtimes is, as said, quite clean. The title, all the showtimes, the movie length in plain text, and almost nothing else extraneous. Clicking a title filters to just theaters showing it. Clicking a time usually allows you to buy tickets online when possible. About the only downside is you only have the choice between a single theater or all the ones nearby (I don’t know if signing in to Google lets you customize it).
It doesn’t always get noticed because I think it only shows up on a search if you type “showtimes <city name/zipcode>”.