After a quarter-century connecting movie-goers with the shows they wanted to see, Moviefone's phone service will no longer take calls.
Moviefone, home to the iconic "Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!" greeting that has been parodied on everything from Seinfeld to Saturday Night Live, won't operate by phone starting in about one month from now. It will, however, still survive through its free app.
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Though the service once garnered 3 million calls per week from about 13,000 theaters in 31 cities, according to The New York Times, its numbers have sharply declined with the advent of the Internet and the age of apps. The phone number was receiving only thousands of calls per week before the company decided to cut the service.
The number of callers was already declining in 1999, 10 years after Moviefone was founded. But it was still America's dominant ticket-selling service back then, when AOL bought it for $388 million.
Things got worse when other companies such as Fandango and Movietickets.com began to take huge chunks of the ticket-selling market, and AOL's attempt to rebrand Moviefone as a center of information for movie-goers never really caught on.
There is another rebrand in the works, though. AOL has turned management of Moviefone over to the media company BermanBraun, which will handle the former phone service's creative development, content and product.
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