John Rush

John Rush has worked in cinema technology since 2011, when he built his first cinema aggregator — software that pulled programmes and showtimes from individual cinemas into one place at a time when most exhibitors had no meaningful digital presence at all.

In 2016 he moved from aggregation to building the systems themselves, founding what became Filmgrail. The bet was that the moviegoer-facing layer — the website, the app, the checkout — mattered more to a cinema's revenue than the counter software it was usually bolted onto, and that exhibitors should own it rather than rent it from a ticketing vendor.

That work made Filmgrail an early mover in native cinema apps. Rather than treating an app as a ticket in a wrapper, the team built for engagement between visits: autoplaying trailers in the feed, stories, watchlists and social features borrowed from consumer social products rather than from ticketing software. The result on the platform was roughly 30% of app users opening the app in a given week — about four times the market benchmark for cinema apps at the time.

His current work is applying AI to cinema operations, with the explicit goal of automating 99% of the repetitive work a cinema does: programme and metadata ingestion, scheduling, content production, campaign targeting and reporting — the tasks that consume a small team's week and produce the errors moviegoers actually notice.

He writes here about the parts of the business he has had to solve in production: ticketing and checkout conversion, cinema apps, loyalty and audience data, and what exhibitors should expect from the software they buy.