MOBILE PHONES BECOME MOVIE TICKETS

Thanks in large part to a new mobile phone app, online movie-ticket site Fandango says that a record 22 percent of the tickets it sold for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 were ordered via mobile phones. In fact, it said, mobile phone sales topped those for the final Harry Potter movie, which came in at 20 percent of tickets sold by Fandango. The online ticket seller introduced a new service, Mobile Ticket, with Regal Entertainment, the country’s largest film chain, that allows mobile phone users to receive their movie tickets directly on their smartphones as barcodes. In a statement, the company said that the service allows moviegoers to “take their mobile phones straight to the theater ticket-taker, bypassing the box office windows and kiosks,”  thereby allowing them to get into the theater and take their seats “faster than ever before.”