About this concept
An unofficial fan redesign, not affiliated with or endorsed by Cineworld. Here’s what it is, why it exists, and what’s real.
Why it exists
Cineworld's September 2026 relaunch made it hard to book a group into seats next to each other. This concept starts from that one problem — seeing and choosing your seats together — and builds outward: reschedule without losing your seats, a wheelchair space that's part of the plan instead of a separate form, a seat finder scoped to your own cinema instead of the whole country.
The design system
Called “The Programme Grid” inside this project: a flat near-black background, hairline rules, an oversized grotesque for headings, and white showing blocks laid out on a real time axis. Cineworld red is reserved for one job — the mark, the “now” line, hover, selection and the one primary action per screen — so it still means something when you see it.
What's demonstrated
A seat map that understands parties, wheelchair spaces and companion seats, and warns you before a choice strands a single seat. A group booking flow that puts everyone's tickets in one order. A finder that searches your cinema for the soonest showing that seats you all together. An accessibility finder across every cinema. A quick group poll for picking a film in the room. Browsing, searching and booking never need an account — a guest just gives an email for the ticket; your watchlist and your Unlimited group of friends do need one, since those are genuinely yours to keep.
What's real and what isn't
The cinema names and cities are real places. Film titles, posters, synopses and cast for what's now showing and coming soon are real too, pulled from TMDB (this product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB). Signing up is real too: a real account, a real password (hashed and checked by Supabase Auth, never handled or stored by this site itself), a real database row for every booking, watchlist entry and group member, kept private to you. Book without an account and it's kept in your browser instead, the same way everything here worked before accounts existed. Everything Cineworld-specific — showtimes, prices, seat maps, the Unlimited price, and the two special screenings — is invented for this concept and regenerated deterministically from the date. Nothing is booked for real: no payment is taken and no confirmation email is sent, even though the booking itself is saved for real.
How it's built
Next.js App Router, TypeScript and plain CSS, no component library. Accounts, bookings, your Unlimited group and your watchlist live in a real Postgres database (Supabase), each row visible only to the account that made it. Everything else — the programme, seat maps, prices — is generated deterministically in your browser from the date and a film's slug, no database needed. Film data itself is fetched from TMDB ahead of time by a small script and checked into the project, not fetched live.