The Objectively Best Movie Seat

When Project Hail Mary opened in NYC, I spent three days clicking through individual theater websites trying to find decent seats. Was it worth it for a Disneyfied Ryan Gosling? Debatable. But it made me realize how ridiculous the process is, you have to check every theater one by one to find worthwhile seats. So my co-founder and I spent the last few months building Seatmaxxing. 

It pulls real time showtimes and seat maps across NYC theaters  (AMC, Nitehawk, all of them) and shows you the best available seats for every showing within your chosen time window. Instead of opening 15 tabs, you can compare every seatmap and available seat for a specific movie during your chosen time range in one place.

A few things that made this harder than I expected:

• Most theater chains don't have a public API — getting real seat-level data meant reverse-engineering each chain's own booking flow individually (some are clean JSON APIs, some needed full browser automation to click through date pickers)

• Seat "quality" isn't as simple as row/center — had to dig into actual cinema acoustics standards (THX calibration point) to get the scoring right

• We don't sell tickets ourselves — every result links straight to the theater's own official booking page, so they keep 100% of the sales

Its live now: www.seatmaxxing.com

I'd genuinely love feedback on anything and everything - good or brutal. We're adding more cities, as well as expanding beyond movies - updates coming soon!

Happy to answer questions about how any of the scraping/scoring works too — this ended up being a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected going in.