In what should be encouraging news for 20th Century Fox, interest in free tickets to the upcoming preview footage of “Avatar” crashed the movie’s web site yesterday, reports the Hollywood Reporter.
Tickets were made available at noon yesterday for screenings this week of the 16 minutes of preview footage. After 17,000 of the 68,000 available tickets were distributed, the site was forced to shut down due to an overwhelming demand.
“Due to the overwhelming response for tickets to the ‘Avatar’ event on 8/21, our servers have crashed. We will update you as soon as possible,” ticket seekers were advised by “Avatar’s” Twitter site.
By late afternoon, avatarmovie.com was again up and running, taking five orders every second. Locations in New York and Los Angeles sold out almost immediately, and most tickets were expected to be snapped up by the end of the day.
“I think to say that there is already a lot of interest in the movie is a pretty good understatement. Obviously, it blew out all the servers,” said Greg Foster, Imax’s chairman and president of filmed entertainment. “It’s a pretty big statement about the curiosity and interest in the whole thing.”
