About this app

What this app does — and the vocabulary that makes it honest

This app tracks showtimes at the two Chattanooga AMC theatres. It does one thing AMC's app does not: it knows when a movie actually starts and ends, not just when the ticket says. Every time in this app speaks the same vocabulary:

advertisedStart

The ticket time — what AMC prints. It is when the preshow (ads and trailers, ~25 minutes) begins.

featureStart

When the movie actually starts: advertisedStart + the preshow. This is when you need to be seated.

end

featureStart + the published runtime. This is when the seat frees up — and where every plan is measured from.

This vocabulary note is the product's reason to exist: a "7:15 show" is a ticket time, the movie starts near 7:40, and "ends Wednesday" is only ever claimed when the schedule actually says so.

The day page

The Day page is one continuous board — every movie is a lane on an hour axis, and the scroll moves across days:

• By movie, across days — One lane per film with real start and end times; pin two lanes and drag them side by side to read where one movie's end lands against another's start. Scroll to move across days — published days first, then the schedule wall with each movie's rhythm projected forward as dashed, unconfirmed slots.

Double features

AMC can tell you two movies both play tonight; it cannot tell you whether you can actually sit through both. The planner pairs screenings and measures the gap from the first movie's real end to the second's ticket time — not from the printed time, which would overstate the break by the whole preshow.

• Travel time between the two theatres (about 20 minutes door to door, parking included) is subtracted from the gap; what remains is true slack.
• Same-theatre pairings are the default — a plan never assumes a drive you didn't ask for. Cross-town double features are an explicit toggle.

Ending soon — and the honesty rule

"How long is this playing?" is answered for every movie at every theatre, as one scan sees it — with the uncertainty left in. AMC publishes a full slate only through the current schedule week, plus a thin advance-sale tail beyond it. A movie whose run ends at that wall has an unknown last day: the run is probably not ending, the schedule just stops there. The app says "last scheduled" rather than printing a fake countdown — false certainty about run ends is the exact mistake this app exists to prevent.

Data sources

• Development: captured fixture replay — verbatim schedule payloads pushed through the same normalizer as live scans, so no credits are ever spent locally.
• Production: the parse.bot managed API, metered at one credit per theatre-day and guarded by a hard budget.
• Built and pending: the official AMC API provider — unmetered and ready — awaiting key activation; it switches in without code changes.