There has never been a more innovative or competitive time for point-of-sale (POS) systems in the cinema industry. Last decade’s promises of e-commerce and big data in exhibition have been fulfilled and have already transformed the way cinemas do business. Now, as we enter the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, cinemas are looking for their POS systems to grow with them as they expand their operations to include arcades, full-service bars and restaurants, bowling alleys, and dynamic pricing initiatives across premium auditoriums. The in-house, custom-built systems of the 2000s have fallen short of the solutions specialized vendors can offer, particularly when it comes to addressing the idiosyncrasies of a business that operates at low capacity most of the week, only to be overwhelmed by demand during peak periods.
“The POS market has shifted from traditional cash registers with optional online integrations to fully connected digital ecosystems,” explained Shane Burkett, director of strategic marketing at Agile Ticketing Solutions. “Mobile ordering became mainstream, dine-in accelerated the need for kitchen and timing logic, loyalty moved from punch-card mentality to data-driven personalization, and operators demanded tighter integrations to reduce labor strain and friction.”
“It isn’t just about selling tickets anymore,” said Jon Love, director of operations at Ready Theatre Systems. “POS systems must support a wide range of programs and technologies that help exhibitors engage customers and compete in a market that extends well beyond the auditorium. Modern cinema POS platforms need to remain flexible and integrate seamlessly with specialized services when a location’s success depends on it.”
If running a cinema wasn’t hard enough on its own, an increasing number of today’s exhibitors are now restaurateurs, barkeeps, and bowling alley proprietors—sometimes within the same location. Keeping track of sales, loyalty points, and operational efficiencies has become a unique blending of multiple business models, managing patrons from showtime to dining tab within a complex on any given night. Alan Roe, CEO of Jacro, sees the expansion of exhibition into other arenas as a challenge that a POS system should be tailored to address. “As cinemas expand their offerings, their overheads increase,” he said. “The primary responsibility of today’s cinema POS is to ensure that as cinemas offer more complex offerings, their incremental income outstrips the incremental costs, making these investments profitable.”
Jacro’s POS solution, Tapos, has emerged as a contender in the cinema space over the last couple of years. Having signed regional players like GQT and VIP Movies in 2023, Tapos integrated its largest client in the United States to date, B&B Theatres, an exhibitor that hosts full-service kitchens, arcades, and several premium auditoriums at any given location. Tapos provides its clients with a suite of native customer relationship tools at no additional cost, features that Roe said help increase revenue per customer. “But a POS needs to do much more than drive incremental revenue,” he added. “It needs to keep operating costs manageable too. We often say, ‘Computers should only need to be told the same thing once.’ Automation is key: creating simple ways for our customers to offer upsells, or to have fully automated pricing, or calculation of film rental.”
Shane Burkett uses the term “synchronization” to describe what has helped Agile’s POS system stand out in the marketplace: synchronizing ticketing with kitchen timing for dine-in, synchronizing guest identity across subscription and loyalty, and synchronizing operational data so managers don’t have to jump between systems to understand what’s happening in real time.
“We’ve expanded our platform to support full dine-in operations, integrated digital ordering, dynamic premium large format (PLF) pricing, family entertainment attractions, and modern loyalty frameworks that reward both frequency and spend,” said Burkett. “Most importantly, we’ve done it in a way that doesn’t force exhibitors into a single operating model. Whether a venue is PLF, dine-in, mixed-use, or a cultural arts center, the tools adapt to how they operate, not the other way around.”
Third-party integration has also become a key feature for the most successful POS providers, expanding the capabilities of a cinema’s software. Darrin Lewis, president of Omniterm, highlights his company’s integration with Intercard to help exhibitors unify payments, gift cards, and loyalty across attractions. “This eliminates disconnected POS systems, streamlines backend operations, and enhances the guest experience,” said Lewis. “Although our customers serve the same audience, their operations are unique. We prioritize understanding those differences to deliver solutions that align with each customer’s needs.”
Vista, the leading cinema POS provider in the market, similarly stresses the importance of partner integration with its solutions. Vista works with Brunswick for bowling, Embed for arcade and attractions card systems, and is onboarding Toast for dining. Recently, Vista has also integrated with Deliverect, an omnichannel digital hub that offers at-home food delivery to cinemas.
Speaking on the heels of VistaCon, the company’s annual client conference in New Zealand, Matthew Liebmann, chief product, innovation, and marketing officer, highlighted 104 new features launched for the product over the last two years.
He describes Vista’s current focus as delivering on three key benchmarks for clients: efficiency, effectiveness, and experience. These benchmarks are achieved across four areas: personalization, decision support, self-service, and going beyond the movie to follow exhibitors into new frontiers such as dine-ins and family entertainment centers. This focus has led to new features like React, a postmovie survey poll sent to ticket buyers: What did you think of the movie you just saw? Which movies do you intend to watch in a cinema next? “We’re measuring both satisfaction and future intention, which we can then use to deliver personalized marketing campaigns for future titles from trailer drop to last showtime,” he said.
These innovations influence programming decisions, which Vista optimizes on a site-by-site level with an assisted scheduling tool that allows exhibitors to tailor programming for each location in seconds. By midyear, Vista plans to expand its audience-feedback capabilities by launching customer satisfaction scores for cleanliness, courtesy, food and beverage, and comfort. Each of those scores will be aggregated to produce an overarching net promoter score at both the site and circuit levels, allowing exhibitors to monitor their operations from an individual and collective perspective in real time.
The biggest change coming to the cinema POS market this year isn’t a new feature or product, but an entirely new player. Digital ticketing leader Fandango made waves in December last year by announcing the acquisition of cinema POS upstart Indy Cinema Group, relaunching the service as Fandango1 at CinemaCon 2026.
Ian Brown, co-founder of Indy, calls the acquisition “rocket fuel” for the company. He cites Fandango’s resources as crucial to growing the business by expanding its engineering and sales team across the industry. Brown and his business partner, Keith Walker, who owns the Yosemite Cinema and serves as Indy’s CTO, spent the pandemic rebuilding a POS system tailored for independent operators. “We very quickly realized we were building a piece of technology that nobody else was developing,” he said. “It wasn’t just for independents; it was for any cinema that wanted to use technology to move their business forward.”
Their timing couldn’t have been better. Indy’s rise in the postpandemic exhibition business was vast and rapid, gaining marquee clients across key global markets as a start-up run by the Brown-Walker duo. “Three years later, we already had 300 cinemas integrated into our system,” said Brown.
Installing a new POS system in a business is like replacing the plumbing in your home: a significant investment with potentially costly consequences if mismanaged. Pandemic closures and the slow box-office ramp-up that followed presented a perfect opportunity for exhibitors to make significant changes and upgrades to their POS systems, with each of the six companies discussed in this article opening important new accounts. Multiple companies in this article also reported losing key accounts during this period, only to welcome them back months later after discovering their new provider was happier with their original solution.
“Cinemas have streamlined their operations and upgraded their POS systems since the pandemic,” said Jacro’s Roe. “When cinemas were full, they were too busy to undertake the operational change required by a POS upgrade. Emerging from the pandemic with a quieter box office and additional financial pressure, there has been a new opportunity for more innovative cinema POS systems to expand their footprint.” This is the backdrop that led to Fandango’s acquisition of Indy. Jerramy Hainline joined the digital ticketing leader in 2022 as part of a management overhaul that introduced several top executives from NBC Sports’ Golf Channel and its B2B division, GolfNow. After more than a decade of introducing software solutions for golf courses, Hainline thought Fandango could have a similar impact on cinema operators. “I felt the technology for circuits that existed when I came into this business was not what it should be and not up to par with other industries,” he said. The similarities between the two verticals—golf and movies—were apparent to Hainline: perishable inventory tied to specific dates and times. GolfNow sells tee times; Fandango sells movie tickets. The time was ripe for innovation, and Hainline saw Fandango1 as an opportunity to bring GolfNow’s innovations to the cinema industry. One of those innovations is a procurement program that brought significant savings to golf course owners and operators, according to Hainline. Known as ClubBuy, it serves as a buying group for small-to-medium-sized operators seeking the best prices on concessions and equipment.
Hainline describes Fandango1 as a one-stop shop for all theater operations— completely integrated with the Fandango network of companies. The potential of Fandango1 goes beyond a POS system, aiming to become a turnkey solution for theater operations. Exhibitors would go from having Fandango drive their digital ticketing to driving how they manage the entire circuit. It represents a significant development for Fandango, expanding into B2B cinema services after having cornered the B2C digital ticketing market in the United States. Hainline is careful to note that, despite Fandango1’s ambitious reach, no division of the company will be leveraged against any other. “We want to work with everybody,” he said. “For example, you don’t have to sell tickets through our ticketing platform to use our procurement program, ClubBuy. We want everybody to find value in what we do. We are not going to strong-arm people into doing things they don’t want to do with us.”
‘Art houses have joined major circuits in making these POS upgrades. Agile’s Burkett notes several sector-specific idiosyncrasies that set it apart from most commercial cinemas. They include more complex membership structures, donor and nonprofit reporting, hybrid concessions models, and a far more personal relationship with their patrons. Additionally, an art house theater’s ticketing needs are even more nuanced, because of special-event tickets and pricing for festivals, retrospectives, and visiting artists.
“Art houses aren’t just cinemas—they’re community and cultural institutions. A one-size-fits-all multiplex POS just doesn’t fit that reality,” said Burkett. “A POS partner serving this sector must be built for flexibility and storytelling, not just transactions. Art houses need tools that help deepen engagement, communicate value to members, and integrate seamlessly with development offices, customer relationship management, and community programming. Tailoring isn’t just a convenience—it’s central to their mission.”
Ultimately, choosing a POS provider has deep implications for how a cinema runs and operates. Selecting the right provider isn’t just about picking the right software; switching POS providers can lead to unexpected changes in services from other vendors or third-party partners. That is why cinemas must ensure their POS provider is able and willing to collaborate with existing partners instead of cornering them into a specific set of services.
“Your POS needs to be robust, reliable, and collaborative,with a client-led product roadmap that brings elements of innovation from your provider,” says Vista’s Liebmann. He cites the cinema industry’s seasonality, with a box office increasingly defined by peaks and troughs in the release schedule, as an example of why it’s so important to pick the right partner. “You can’t afford to go down at the busiest time of the year. When peak moviegoing season arrives, you’ve got to be able to climb to the top of the mountain without skipping a beat.”
At the heart of this conversation is a cinema’s connection with its customers. Having seen how e-commerce has upended the restaurant and travel industries, with digital intermediaries like Uber Eats and Priceline owning the customer relationship entirely, cinemas must be cautious about just how much autonomy they might give up when working with a POS provider. “We only succeed when our exhibitor clients achieve their objectives,” said Liebmann. “We can’t win if the exhibitor loses, and that applies to a cinema’s connection to their moviegoers. We’ve never been in a situation where we siphon a direct client relationship for our benefit and to the detriment of the exhibitor.”
Strong competition and rapidly advancing technology make this the perfect time for cinemas to revolutionize their operations with the right POS solution. Several of the providers discussed in this article have just started to use artificial intelligence, and its true impact will become evident in the weeks and months ahead. It’s a high-stakes investment, and one that could change the course of your business as Hollywood continues to undergo a realignment that has led to studios releasing fewer films and exhibitors introducing more amenities and attractions.
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