Product Strategy Case Study
How Flicks can bridge the gap between finding a film and experiencing it together — turning cinema discovery into communal attendance.
01 — The Opportunity
The global cinema market is projected to reach $108 billion by 2034. Gen Z attendance grew 25% in the past year — the largest increase of any age group. But the growth isn't driven by better projection or bigger screens. It's driven by something more fundamental: people want to be in a room together.
Cinema is no longer competing with streaming on convenience. It's competing on experience. The pandemic-era decision to release blockbusters on streaming services didn't just shift distribution — it recalibrated how audiences perceive theatrical exhibition. Audiences now use social word-of-mouth as a heuristic not just to decide whether to watch a film, but where to watch it — and increasingly, the films that earn theatrical attendance are the ones that promise communal energy, shared presence, and the particular quality of attention that only a dark room full of strangers can produce. People leave home for the electricity of a collective experience, not just a bigger screen. The films that succeed theatrically are the ones that feel like events worth being present for.
But every step that leads to that moment — discovering a film, deciding to go, coordinating with friends, choosing a session, and reflecting on the experience afterwards — is an act of social investment. Each step generates value: intent data, social signals, group dynamics, emotional response. Together they form an ecosystem that doesn't just support cinema attendance — it generates it.
The real value unlock isn't in the content. It's in the ecosystem that draws people back into initiating in-person experiences. That's where meaning can be designed, and where an innovative and human-centric platform has the most to gain.
02 — Flicks Today
Flicks has built something genuinely good. The 2025 Australian Good Design Award jury called it "a really well integrated, well considered solution to a very modern problem." The numbers reinforce this: app users engage 8x more frequently than web users, and Flicks reports 74% growth in studio and distributor campaigns alongside rising user engagement.
The core product solves two real pain points well: "What should I watch?" and "Where can I watch it?" The watchlist-to-notification pipeline is smart. The editorial voice is distinctive and human. The streaming aggregation across 30+ platforms solves a problem no one else is solving.
But Flicks currently ends where the most valuable part of cinema begins.
The app helps users discover a film. It shows them where and when it's playing. Then it hands them off — to a cinema's booking site, to a group chat, to whatever ad hoc coordination gets them into a seat. The moment of highest commercial value — the transition from intent to attendance — happens outside the platform.
03 — The Gap
Cinema attendance is fundamentally a social coordination problem. The research is clear on this — and it reframes the opportunity entirely.
A 2025 factorial survey study found that personal recommendation from close friends is the single most significant predictor of cinema attendance, regardless of film genre — across romance, sci-fi, documentary, and horror. A separate study of 472 moviegoers found that the direct social utility of the theatrical experience — going with someone — was a better predictor of attendance than social media FOMO or social capital.
Meanwhile, 59% of moviegoers discover films through social media. But social buzz alone doesn't convert to tickets. The conversion happens when someone acts on a friend's recommendation — and that step is where every platform drops the user.
The design implication is significant: Flicks shouldn't try to build a social network. It should reduce friction between "my friend said this is amazing" and "we're going Saturday at 7."
| Platform | Discovery | Showtimes | Ticketing | Social | Post-film |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fandango | ◐ | ● | ● | ○ | ○ |
| Atom Tickets | ◐ | ● | ● | ◐ | ○ |
| Letterboxd | ● | ◐ | ○ | ● | ● |
| JustWatch | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| IMDb | ● | ◐ | ○ | ○ | ◐ |
| Flicks (current) | ● | ● | ◐ | ○ | ○ |
| Flicks (proposed) | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | ● |
● Strong ◐ Partial ○ Missing
04 — Cinema Together
Three interconnected features — collectively called Cinema Together — that extend Flicks from a discovery tool into a social cinema coordination platform. Each is scoped to Flicks' current technical reality, tied to a specific research insight, and connected to Vista Group's commercial interests.
Users browse showtimes in isolation. A friend might have the same film on their watchlist, be planning to attend the same session, or have just recommended it to someone else — and on every existing platform, that interest is invisible. The research shows that personal recommendation from close friends is the single strongest predictor of attendance, but the signal never reaches the moment of decision. Social Signals surfaces this latent intent, turning private interest into a shared prompt to act.
Surface social context on films and showtimes through subtle, non-intrusive signals. On the showtimes screen, friend avatars appear stacked beneath session time pills — making it immediately visible who's already going where. A banner reading "3 friends want to see this" with a Join call-to-action bridges the gap between passive browsing and group commitment. On the film detail page, friends' interest levels appear as status tags — Going, Interested, Watchlisted — giving the user social proof before they even reach showtimes. And a dedicated Friends' Sessions view groups every friend session by date, answering "when and where are my friends going this week?" with a single tap to join.
The signals are ambient, not performative — they encourage coordination without requiring explicit planning. Privacy defaults to friends-only, with visibility controls. The three interactive prototypes below demonstrate this flow end-to-end:
The strongest driver of cinema attendance isn't what's playing — it's who you're going with. Research consistently finds that the direct social utility of the theatrical experience outperforms both FoMO and social capital as predictors of attendance. Yet the coordination step — getting from "we should see that" to "we're going Saturday at 7" — happens entirely outside every cinema platform. It lives in group chats, fragmented across messages and compromises.
Planning a cinema outing requires juggling group chats, checking everyone's availability, and coordinating showtimes across multiple apps. Flicks ends the journey at "book tickets" — it doesn't help users turn discovery into group attendance. The user has decided what and when, but the who coordination is left to friction-heavy, untracked channels.
A lightweight coordination flow built into the booking journey. The seat selection screen highlights where friends are already sitting in gold, with suggested adjacent seats shown as dashed outlines — turning seat choice into a social decision rather than an arbitrary one. From there, an invite flow lets users search their contacts, select friends, and send invitations in a few taps, with smart suggestions for those who've watchlisted the film. A live RSVP tracker shows confirmed, maybe, invited, and declined statuses at a glance, with a one-tap reminder nudge for anyone who hasn't responded.
For friends not yet on Flicks, the invitation arrives as a shareable deep link that opens a clean web preview — a natural acquisition point for new users. The three interactive prototypes below demonstrate this coordination flow:
Research on social media and cinema found that while FoMO didn't significantly predict going to the cinema, both FoMO and bridging social capital strongly predicted sharing about the experience afterwards. People want to talk about what they've just seen — and this post-viewing energy drives further discovery for others. A computational analysis of social word-of-mouth patterns across 40 films found that theatrical releases generated significantly longer-lived social media conversations than streaming releases — suggesting that the shared, communal nature of cinema-going produces more durable cultural engagement. Meanwhile, Flicks users have explicitly requested "mark as watched" functionality. Letterboxd owns this phase entirely. Flicks captures none of it.
After a user's showtime passes, Flicks has no touchpoint. The app helped them discover the film and find a session, but the experience ends at the cinema door. The user logs on Letterboxd, posts on Instagram, and texts friends — all engagement and data that Flicks misses.
Two hours after a showtime passes (detectable via session time data Flicks already has), a push notification arrives on the user's lock screen — matching iOS native notification patterns to feel familiar rather than intrusive. Tapping "Rate it" opens an emoji-first reaction sheet: five emotion-mapped options (Loved it, Liked it, It was ok, Boring, Hated it) that auto-map to a star rating, lowering cognitive load to a single tap. An optional note field lets users capture a thought while it's fresh. The reaction flows into a personal viewing diary — a stats-driven timeline of every film watched, with context auto-captured: date, cinema, who you went with (from the "Who's In?" flow), and a Letterboxd export for users who want both.
If the user attended via a group invitation, their reaction joins a group memory — everyone's reactions collected in one view. And a "recommend to a friend" action feeds back into the Social Signals feature, creating the full loop: discover → attend → react → recommend → others discover. The three prototypes below walk through this post-viewing capture flow:
05 — The Bigger Picture
Flicks isn't just a consumer app. It's the demand generation layer for Vista's entire B2B cinema ecosystem.
Vista Group holds 46% global market share in large-circuit cinema management. 5,500+ cinemas across 116 countries run on Vista's infrastructure. SaaS revenue grew 24% year-over-year in H1 2025, with embedded payments targeting $15M in annual recurring revenue. The B2B engine is strong and growing.
Flicks is where that infrastructure meets the consumer. Every improvement to Flicks' ability to convert discovery into attendance drives value for the cinemas running on Vista Cloud. The Cinema Together suite creates a specific flywheel:
Drive group attendance — multiplying ticket yield per intent signal. Social graph data feeds Movio's propensity algorithm and 100M+ moviegoer profiles.
Drive viral growth — every invite is a potential new Flicks user. Group bookings flow through Vista Cloud's ticketing and payments infrastructure.
Extends Vista's existing React survey product to consumers. Sentiment data surfaces in Horizon dashboards — enriching exhibitor and distributor intelligence.
Social attendance patterns and post-film reactions flow to Movio Media — giving studios audience insight no competitor can match.
This positions Flicks not as a content guide, but as the platform that makes going to the movies easy, social, and worth repeating.
06 — About This Work
This case study was researched and designed by Bruno Hart — a design systems strategist with engineering fluency, a Bachelor of Design Innovation in Interaction & Communication Design and a Bachelor of Arts in History & International Relations, with a deep interest in how digital platforms can initiate real-world communal experiences.
The research draws on Fandango's 2025 Moviegoing Trends study (5,000+ respondents), peer-reviewed studies on social influence in cinema attendance, media substitution theory and theatrical brand equity in the streaming era, Cinema United's 2025 industry metrics, Fortune Business Insights market projections, and Vista Group's own investor reports.
The Cinema Together feature concepts were designed with a deliberate scope: improvements that create real value for Flicks and Vista Group today, while respecting the broader vision these ideas exist within. Each proposal was prototyped as an interactive React application — nine screens across three features — to demonstrate not just the concept, but the feel of the interactions at production fidelity.
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