Was ticket sales for Anwar’s movie faked? We went to the cinema and found proof

PM Anwar’s biopic, Anwar: The Untold Story, recently made headlines for its fantastic first day earnings of RM1 million. Now this would’ve been any old news if not for Instagram user, @gogglermy (henceforth Goggler), who pretty much called BS on that number. According to him, audience turnout was so bad that there was no way the movie could have done that well.

But here’s the catch: Producers of the movie actually claimed the opposite, raving about sold-out screenings in Mid Valley and Penang.

“(The movie) created history by being the film with the earliest bookings by cinema operators. Cinemas in Mid Valley and Penang were already fully booked and reserved in advance for the film’s screening,” — Zulkiflee Anwar Haque, executive producer via The Rakyat Post

As it so happened, Goggler shared a screenshot of a fully booked screening at Mid Valley. And at first glance, it seemed to be true since there were only 2 vacant seats left in the entire cinema. But when Goggler actually got to the venue, things turned out to be completely different cos–

Jeng, jeng, jeng… it was as empty as Farid Kamil’s portrayal of Anwar himself 🙁

But seriously, after seeing all of this, we simply had to know– who’s booking these tickets? Why didn’t they turn up? And most importantly, was this a single isolated incident or is there more to it than just rich lazy people mass booking Anwar’s new film and bailing at the same time?

To answer these questions, we got tickets to the next showing of Anwar: The Untold Story, and here’s what we found.

Nearly half of the booked seats were empty

Before we dive into the juicy deets, let’s get the preliminary stuff out the way first. Basically, we chose the 8.15 pm screening at KLCC cos it had the most booked seats– and that makes it easier for us to compare occupied seats with empty ones. We also have to mention that our count of booked seats may not be 100% accurate, since the screenshot we have was taken an hour before the show, but agak-agak should be close to the final number la.

With that sorted, here’s the screenshot of the website. We counted a grand total of 80 booked seats, but y’all feel free to count them too. Also note the rows F, G and H that are blocked out in red, cos these are the ones that we’ll mention later.

Needless to say, the cinema filled up damn slowly. 10 minutes past the official start time and the seats were still looking like this:

Things only picked up at around 8.30 pm, right when the lights went out. By then more people had arrived, but fret not, we kept a really close eye on the headcount. And y’all, the results were honestly mind-blowing.

Out of the 80 booked seats, only 43 ended up occupied. That’s like almost half of the ticket holders being no-shows! Sure we were expecting discrepancies, but this was way more than we imagined.

Unfortunately, the movie was literally so dark that moments where the screen was bright enough to reflect on the audience were few and far in between. But even with our potato quality pic, it’s pretty obvious things weren’t adding up. In fact, those areas highlighted in blue are rows F, G and H that we mentioned earlier– they were meant to be full, but as evidenced by the picture, that wasn’t the case.

So just what the heck is going on?

Local distributors are trying to seduce movie-goers with fake hype

So here’s the thing: if you’re a movie buff and you see a sold-out show, you’d probably think it’s a must-see film, right?

Well according to Goggler, the problem here is that the show isn’t really sold-out. It’s local distributors who are buying those tickets to make it seem like the movie is in high demand.

“Local distributors will block buy seats during the first weekend of their movie to create a false sense of hype. It happens all the time to inflate numbers and ensure cinemas don’t reduce the number of screenings for their movie,” — Goggler, via his Instagram story

With a bit of digging, we may have found the reason why this happens. You see, once a Malaysian movie gets the green light for local cinema release, producers can apply for a compulsory screening scheme which means the movie will be shown for a minimum of 14 days. But this scheme comes with conditions, and it all boils down to the fact that selling tickets is key, or else the movie will be pulled.

Still, there could be other reasons why those seats were empty. People could’ve genuinely bought the tickets but were unable to make it, or some of them may have wanted to support the local film industry but had no intention of attending. There are even theories that there may be some propaganda at play…