'The Lincoln Lawyer' joins the Groupon bandwagon

By Sarah Sluis

The Lincoln Lawyer seems like a fun genre movie, a nice throwback to the John Grisham adaptations starring Tom Cruise and Matt Damon. But it also registers as a movie that a lot of people will wait to watch at home. Enter: Groupon, which Lionsgate is using to incentivize people to see it at the theatre. Today in NYC, for example, one can get a voucher to see the movie for just $6, redeemable on Fandango. Considering movie tickets in NYC go for twice that, it's a pretty good deal.

Before I go any further, let me say this: I love Groupon, Living Social, BuyWithMe, BloomSpot, and all those other "daily deal" sites, so much so that I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all of my purchases and their expiration dates. They usually offer 50% discounts and have somehow managed to remove that feeling of indignity you can get when redeeming a coupon. So I'm naturally in favor of movie theatres jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, they already have. I've seen deals for cheap Fandango tickets on competitor Living Social. I'm also pretty sure I've seen some independent cinemas offer discounted tickets (though I can't confirm this because expired deals have a tricky way of disappearing).

But will it pay off for Lionsgate? According to most insiders, Groupon tends to charge a 50% commission, meaning that Lionsgate would get just $3 for each ticket, which would be split further with Fandango. But there are always the people who forget to redeem, or forget to buy but then decide they want to go anyway. As of this posting, 11,000 people in the NYC area bought tickets to The Lincoln Lawyer, totaling $66,000 in sales. It's unclear how this will be reflected in the weekend box office, but I'll be keeping my eye on this movie's performance. After all, Groupon's subscribers total 60 million, an awful lot of people to be messaged about one movie.