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One of the founders of the movie ticketing service Fandango has died following an apparent suicide in New York City.<\/p>\n
J. Michael Cline, the co-founder of the movie ticket website and service Fandango, died Tuesday after falling from the balcony of a Manhattan hotel in what the medical examiner\u2019s office ruled as a suicide, according to The New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Cline co-founded Fandango in 2000 with former chief operating officer Art Levitt during the dot-com boom and became one of the biggest online retailers. Fandango launched with seven movie theater chains, according to Variety<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Fandango found success by completely changing the way people went to the movies. Moviegoers didn\u2019t have to wait in long ticket lines only to find out that the 6 PM showing of Battlefield Earth <\/em>was already sold out. They could purchase their tickets before they even left home and still have time to buy an overpriced box of Milk Duds and a watered down Shasta.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s flashy orange \u201cF\u201d logo also made it one of the most recognizable online brands in the industry. Cline described his company’s whimsical sounding name to Variety<\/em> as \u201cfast and fun\u201d and a \u201cperfect match to a service designed to make going to the movies easier and more enjoyable than ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n Five years after its launch, online movie ticket sites like Fandango and its competitor Movietickets.com sold tickets worth over $30 million<\/a> in one year. Comcast<\/a> bought the Fandango brand in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Fandango also bought some of the Internet\u2019s hottest movie properties such as the aggregated movie review website Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> in 2017. The movie ticket brand went through subsequent parent sales until it landed with its current owners NBCUniveral and Warner Bros., which expanded the Fandango brand to a streaming service called Fandango at Home as a replacement for Vudu.<\/p>\n Fandango continues to thrive as an online ticket retailer even at a time when movie theaters are seeing a huge slump in sales. During the Barbenheimer <\/em>craze last summer, Fandango sold 3.5 million tickets<\/a> alone just to the Oscar nominated and winning films Barbie <\/em>and Oppenheimer<\/em>.<\/p>\n Cline left Fandango in 2011 and went on to become the executive chairman of the tech investment firm Juxtapose that helped launch health and wellness companies like Care\/of and Corduroy, according to the firm\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n Levitt described his former business partner to the New York Times <\/em>as a formidable entrepreneur who was \u201ca bit of an adventurer\u201d and someone who \u201csaw an opportunity in the market\u201d with Fandango.<\/p>\n In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 or you can simply dial 988. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains <\/em>a list of crisis lines<\/em><\/a> for people outside of those countries.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n