Looking for site where I can search for movie showtimes using a map interface

January 7, 2012 12:47 PM

Please help me find a site that lets me search for movie showtimes by geography (not just by zipcode or cityname).

I've been wandering around the internet today trying to find showtimes for a couple of movies, and it made me wonder --- why isn't there a site that lets me search for showtimes inside a specified geography, using a map?

Lots of sites --Google, Fandango, IMDB, MovieFone, movies.com-- support searches by geography, but AFAICT only by zipcode, and sometimes also city name. Google will display resuls in a map, but when I redraw the map boundaries, it doesn't redo the search inside them.

This doesn't work for me --- I want to be able to do a broad search for the whole Bay Area. I don't want to manually type in multiple zipcodes or names of towns.

I did ultimately find the information I was looking for on the movie's official sites, but that's not ideal because it means I need to find and visit a different site for each movie.

I don't understand why there isn't a site that will let me search the same way I do on Yelp -- by displaying results inside a map, and redoing its search as I move around the map. Does a service like that exist? If not, isn't that kind of strange?

(I have read this and a bunch of other AskMes on similar topics, but none contains the information I'm looking for.)

Thanks for any help you can offer! This seems like such a self-evidently useful piece of functionality; I can only assume it exists and I am somehow missing it.

posted by Susan PG to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Google does seem to recognize nonstandard city names. I searched for 'movies bay area' and it gave me a pretty comprehensive list.
posted by jourman2 at 12:58 PM on January 7, 2012

Maybe I'm missing something, but I have no idea what you are trying to do. Enter your zip code and it will list all nearby movies. Just keep clicking "more" or "next page" to see those further and further away. You dont need to enter more than 1 zip.

What am I missing here?
posted by User7 at 1:14 PM on January 7, 2012

in the Bay Area, you can also just get a list of all movies playing (by county) by going to sfgate.com/movies/playing, and it will list every movie playing in the Bay Area, and if you click on one, it will show you every theater in the Bay Area that is playing each movie. Or, if you select a county in the drop-down, will show you showtimes of every movie for every theater in that county (like this for Alameda County), but there's no nice map interface or whatever, it's just an easy way to see them all in a list.
posted by brainmouse at 1:20 PM on January 7, 2012

Thank you! None of these are exactly what i was looking for (a map), but they all solve my problem :-)
posted by Susan PG at 1:29 PM on January 7, 2012

(Whoops I did not mean to post that yet. Adding: I'll leave this unresolved for a while in case the map thing does exist, but if nobody knows about a map interface, I am still happy. Particularly that I can search for Bay Area on Google showtimes -- that is great.)
posted by Susan PG at 1:32 PM on January 7, 2012

You may still need to use multiple zip codes, but using this google URL might get you close to what you want...
http://www.google.com/movies?near=94172&view=map
posted by FreezBoy at 9:10 AM on January 8, 2012