In an exclusive story from The Wrap, production company Open Road Films announced that they would be allowing tickets for their film Dope to be purchased with the digital currency bitcoin. The indie comedy, which was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival this year, prominently features bitcoin as a plot detail when the main characters look for a way to exchange a drug windfall into some quick cash. This film was already in my sights as an understated coming-of-age comedy full of ‘90s references and weird web humor, and while this bitcoin move seems to be largely a marketing ploy, it has definitely piqued my attention further (and to be fair, what isn’t a marketing ploy these days?).
Dope is scheduled to be released on about 2000 screens on Friday, June 19th, and at about half of those you will be able to purchase tickets using bitcoin. The tickets must be purchased through movietickets.com and will use the payment platform GoCoin to make the transaction seem very similar to a normal credit card type of payment, but you’ll need some bitcoin to make all that happen. For those of you who don’t have any, this alone probably isn’t enough of a reason to go out and buy some – but it should register in your mind as something to look into later, especially if the use of bitcoin in the film intrigues you at all. Additionally, movietickets.com is a very prominent site in the world of online movie ticket sales (it is the site advertised at my local theatre, at least, so I have used it often in the past year), and it is possible that sales for Dope tickets in bitcoin could usher in the use of digitial currency in some permanent fashion – which would be awesome.
So, pay attention to Dope when it comes to theatres later this week. If you’ve already got some bitcoin, why not be a part of the first nationwide film to accept the digital currency for ticket purchases? And, if you don’t, then pay for the tickets with your out-dated fiat currency and pay attention to the use of bitcoin in the film. I doubt many of my readers will need to sell a stash of drugs on the quick – but many of them might be interested in everything else bitcoin has to offer.
Enjoy the Redband Trailer for Dope below!