CinemaAssist

Pruneyard Cinemas is an independent movie theater in San Jose, California. Like many small cinemas, they were operating without online ticketing infrastructure, relying on box office sales while their customers increasingly expected to purchase tickets before arriving at the theater.

Independent cinemas face a difficult position in modern moviegoing. Many still rely solely on box office sales, missing customers who expect to buy tickets online before they leave home. Building a custom ticketing platform requires significant investment in software development, payment processing integration, and ongoing maintenance. Most small theater operators cannot justify that cost.

The technical barriers compound the business challenge. Cinema point-of-sale systems like RTS (Retriever Ticketing System) use proprietary XML-based APIs that are complex to integrate with modern web applications. Syncing seat availability between physical box office and online sales in real-time is technically demanding. And maintaining accurate movie information, including posters, trailers, cast, and descriptions, is time-consuming work that often falls behind.

Pruneyard Cinemas needed a way to sell tickets online without replacing their existing systems or taking on the burden of building and maintaining custom software.

The core insight was that independent cinemas needed middleware, not a replacement system. Rather than asking theaters to abandon their existing POS infrastructure, the platform would sit between the cinema’s point-of-sale system and a customer-facing web experience.

This approach meant Pruneyard Cinemas could add online ticketing without disrupting their box office workflows. Staff would continue using the systems they already knew. The online channel would simply connect to that same underlying system.

We built the platform with multi-tenant architecture from the start. The intention was that other movie theaters with different ticketing systems or management systems could eventually use it as well. Each cinema would get their own branded subdomain with isolated customer databases, configurable branding, and independent payment settings. This allowed the platform to scale efficiently while giving each theater a distinct identity rather than looking like a generic ticketing service.

CinemaAssist is a full-stack ticketing platform built on Laravel (backend) and Vue.js (frontend), with PostgreSQL for data storage and AWS S3 for file handling.

The platform handles the complete ticket purchasing flow:

Showtime and seat management. Live sync from the cinema’s POS keeps availability accurate across channels. Interactive seat maps let customers choose their seats. A hold and release mechanism prevents double-booking when multiple customers browse the same showtime.

Automated content. Movie data pulls automatically from TMDB and OMDB, eliminating the manual work of entering posters, trailers, and cast information for every film. Cinemas can override or enhance this data when needed.

Payment processing. The system supports direct credit card processing through RTS, external hosted payment pages, gift cards with or without PINs, and split payments when a gift card balance does not cover the full amount.

Digital ticketing. Customers receive tickets with QR codes for mobile scanning and barcodes for kiosk pickup, along with PDF versions and email confirmations.

The admin dashboard gives cinema staff tools for user management, system configuration, branding setup, and customer account management.

We piloted CinemaAssist with Pruneyard Cinemas, and the platform ran successfully for a year. During that time, we provided ongoing support as the theater operated with online ticketing capabilities that were previously only available to large chains with dedicated technology teams.

The theater could accept online ticket sales without building custom software. Movie information stayed current without manual data entry. Seat inventory stayed synchronized between online and box office channels.

After a year of successful operation, we concluded our engagement with the project.