Theatre booking software for venues that show film and stage

Rådhus-Teatret is Kongsvinger's theatre and its cinema. Stage productions and films are booked on the same site, and the audience that comes for a play is the audience the film programme can reach next. Vega Scene in Oslo shows film alongside theatre and stage, all sold through one site and one checkout.

Arts and culture houses that mix stage, concerts and film, such as Elverum Kulturhus and Ørland Kultursenter, are covered on the cultural centre page.

Search for theatre management software or a theatre management system and you will find three unrelated product categories mixed together:

The third is why so many results mention hospitals. If your search returns "theatre management system NHS" or "operation theatre management software", you have crossed into healthcare and none of it applies to a venue.

There is also a fourth, narrower meaning specific to exhibition: in cinema engineering, a TMS or theatre management system is the system that controls digital projection and screen automation — playlists, ingest, scheduling of the actual playback. That is a projection-booth product, not a business platform, and it is not what most people searching the phrase are looking for.

For a venue, the choice that costs money to get wrong is cinema versus performing arts. A cinema runs a weekly grid of the same titles across halls and owes distributors admissions reporting. A theatre runs productions with runs, on-sale dates, subscriptions and fundraising. A venue that does both has three options:

• An arts box office with film bolted on. Works if film is a small part of the programme; distributor reporting will be manual.
• A cinema system with stage events bolted on. Works if film dominates; subscriptions and memberships will be weaker.
• One shared website, app and checkout in front of both. The audience sees one venue, whichever internal system holds the seat. This is how most mixed venues settle, and it is what Filmgrail does.

Honest fit: if you run a producing theatre with no film at all, and your priorities are subscription seasons and donor fundraising, a dedicated performing-arts system is built for that. Filmgrail is the better fit when film is part of your programme or when the immediate problem is the online booking rather than the counter.

See your own venue on Filmgrail in 20 seconds: the prototype tool reads your current website and builds a working version of it, with a back office you can click through. Then book a demo. Prices are on the pricing page.

Comparing systems? Read Filmgrail vs Spektrix, Spektrix alternatives, Ticketsolve alternatives and AgileTix alternatives, or see how box office software and cinema ticketing software fit together.