Fandango buys Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, continues its dominance among movie sites

BY TODD LONGWELL

Fandango has snatched up more online movie real estate. Today, the online ticket-seller announced it has signed an agreement to acquire social movie site Flixster and film rating site Rotten Tomatoes from Warner Bros. Entertainment.

It comes on the heels of Fandango’s acquisition last month of M-GO, a VOD service featuring new releases and catalog titles from major studios and television producers.

The addition of Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, which reach 20 million unique visitors a month, will bring Fandango’s combined audience reach to more than 63 million monthly uniques.

As part of the deal, Warner Bros. Entertainment will take a minority ownership stake in Fandango and be an ongoing strategic partner. Fandango will continue to operate as a unit of NBCUniversal.

“Our new expanded network will offer unparalleled capabilities for all of our exhibition, studio and promotional partners to reach a massive entertainment audience with innovative marketing and ticketing solutions that benefit from original content, home entertainment products, ‘super tickets,’ gifts with purchase, and other new promotional opportunities,” said Fandango President Paul Yanover in a statement.

Home entertainment and digital video redemption service Flixster Video is not part of the deal, but is expected to transition its users to Fandango’s M-GO video on-demand service later this year, and sunset thereafter. At the same time, Fandango will extend its ticketing capabilities to the Flixster app in the coming months.

Fandango also produces a slate of original online video series covering different aspects of the moviegoing experience via its Movieclips arm (acquired from Zefr in 2014), including “I Love Movies,” “Movie3Some,” “Weekend Ticket,” “FrontRunners,” “Mom’s Movie Minute” and “Reel Kids.”

Photo via Mike Mozart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)