Build a prototype of your cinema website

It fetches your public pages the way a search engine does. From the markup it works out your name, the language you publish in, the country you sell in, your logo, and the colours and typeface your stylesheets are built on. It follows your navigation and reads the pages behind it. Where your site publishes its programme in a way a machine can read — schema.org markup, a film grid with real links — it takes your titles too.

Then it builds the prototype: a public site in your branding, a week of showtimes laid out across auditoriums sized to your screen count, a seat map, a checkout, and a confirmation with a ticket on it. The whole path works. Click a showtime and you end up at a booking, because a demo that stops at the poster is a demo of a poster.

Nothing is installed, nothing on your site is touched, and no login is involved. It reads what is already public.

Alongside the public site the prototype carries a mock-up of the back office: programme planning as a week grid you can read across screens, box office by title, audience insights with the occupancy-by-slot grid that tells you which Tuesday matinee is not worth running, campaign tooling for email, push and SMS, a loyalty scheme with tiers and rewards, a member list, a CMS, pricing rules, and the settings a chain actually needs.

All of it is scenery. There is no system behind it, every control says so when you press it, and the figures are generated rather than measured. What is real is the shape and the data model: your titles, your screens, your currency and your language are already in it, which is a very different conversation from a screenshot of a cinema in another country.

It reads markup, so it is only as good as your markup. A site built as a single JavaScript application with nothing rendered on the server gives it very little. A programme that lives inside an embedded ticketing widget is invisible to it, because that content belongs to the widget's domain rather than yours. A logo drawn as inline SVG rather than an image file will not come across, and you will get a wordmark instead.

When it cannot read your programme it says so on the page and fills the grid from the public release list for your country, so you are looking at a plausible week rather than an empty one. It never claims those are your bookings.

The colours are a best guess from frequency and saturation across your stylesheets. On a site with a disciplined palette it is usually right first time. On a fifteen-year-old theme with four generations of CSS in it, it may pick the wrong blue.

Because the hard part of selling a cinema platform is not the feature list, it is getting an operator to picture their own cinema running on it. A prototype does that in twenty seconds and a slide deck does not do it at all.

The link is yours. Send it to your board, your marketing lead, or the colleague who has to be convinced before anyone will take a meeting. If it makes the case, we would like to talk. If it does not, you have lost twenty seconds and learned something about what your own markup exposes.