So, South Africans are super keen on Marvel’s upcoming superheroes-save-world-from-total-extinction-again film. The one called Avengers: Endgame. The Disney/Marvel title literally obliterated first-day ticket sales worldwide. And it wears the crown for ‘most tickets sold on the first day in South Africa’, too.
Unfortunately, Stuff wasn’t able to get exact figures on tickets sold here at home (or abroad), but Avengers: Endgame has garnered the most pre-sale tickets of any title, ever. Ticket sales opened on 2 April, and within an hour, Endgame had tripled the amount of pre-sale tickets sold for Infinity War in the US.
[PSA. The latest Avengers: Endgame trailer is below. Watch at your own discretion]
According to a Disney Africa spokesperson, “…this was the biggest first-day figure for pre-sales ever. Meaning, no other film has achieved this number of sales within their first day of opening early bookings for a feature in the territory”.
Is this thing on?
Many South Africans took to Twitter when local cinema websites crashed under the immense first-day sales pressure. Some Ster-Kinekor customers opted to drive to their nearest branch to ensure tickets for opening day. Others suffered from double payments and no confirmation emails.
There’s a first for everything.. drove to the cinema to get my #AvengersEndgame tickets after an epic fail online with SK.
— Nafisa Akabor (@nafisa1) April 2, 2019
https://twitter.com/Sir_Krypton/status/1113460284147097601
Although Ster-Kinekor hadn’t responded to Stuff’s emails at the time of writing, Nu Metro did issue a statement. The company assured customers that its systems were functional from day one of pre-sales for the Marvel flick.
“Nu Metro’s website is stable and definitely has the capacity to handle the masses of traffic trying to book tickets for Avengers: Endgame ever since bookings opened just after 3pm yesterday [2 April 2019]. Our website is built to handle bookings for such blockbuster movie hype — as has been the case with previous record-breaking releases from Marvel Studios and all the other major film distributors,” says Chantelle Burrows, Nu Metro’s marketing and content executive.
Whether you managed to get tickets for the 25th April pre-screening of Avengers: Endgame, or opted for the first official showing on 26 April, we hope the internet didn’t fail you. Just don’t pull a fast one on your boss on Endgame day, or they’ll turn into something far worse than Thanos.