Filmgrail + Vista

Vista is a deep back-office system. Film booking, scheduling, inventory, pricing, concessions, settlement and reporting are the job it was designed for, and circuits that have shaped ten years of process around it are right to be nervous about anyone proposing to rip it out.

We are not proposing that. Filmgrail reads your programme, sessions, seat maps, ticket types and pricing rules out of Vista and takes over everything from the moment a moviegoer lands on your site. The sale comes back into Vista as an ordinary transaction, so your daily reports, your film hire settlement and your distributor reporting carry on exactly as they do today.

What changes is the surface. Instead of a ticketing vendor's web module with your logo on it, you get a site and a pair of native apps designed around the way people actually choose a film — and a CMS your marketing team can use without raising a ticket.

Everything that makes Vista worth having. Film booking and distributor settlement, the scheduling engine, inventory and stock, counter and kiosk POS, gift card and voucher liability, the general ledger interface and the whole reporting stack stay in Vista, unchanged.

This also means the migration risk of a Filmgrail project is genuinely small. If it went badly, you would be back to your previous website. Your box office would never have been touched.

First we look at what your deployment exposes. That is a short technical conversation, not a discovery workshop, and it ends with a straight answer about whether the integration is a week of work or a quarter of it.

Then the build: your branding, your content model, your seat maps, your ticket types, your checkout rules. You review it on a staging site against your real programme, not a demo dataset.

Then launch, with your old URLs redirected rather than dropped so the search visibility you have built comes with you. Apps follow the site, usually a few weeks behind, because the CMS and the content are shared and there is no point shipping an empty app.

Nothing in that sequence requires you to touch the box office, which is why the risk of trying it is so much lower than it feels.