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‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’ Tickets Sell Out Immediately

By Clare Mulligan
Published on: 00:06 PST, Nov 22, 2016

This morning, fans lined up in virtual queues for newly released Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets. The London West End play has seen massive financial success ever since it opened this summer, and the script version of Cursed Child sold extremely well, with MuggleNetreporting that it moved over 2 million copies in just its first two days on sale.

In an email sent out to subscribers earlier this week and republished in Express, 60,000 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets “will be released for performances from 13 December 2017 to 4 February 2018. Tickets are priced from £15 and there are over 300 tickets for every performance at £20 or less per part.”

While the script is only one book, the live theatrical performance of Cursed Child consists of two plays: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Part One and Part Two. Fans hoping to see the full story therefore have to buy tickets for two different showtimes in order to see what happens in the story.

The method for buying Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets is unusual compared to how fans normally buy tickets for popular concerts and events. While most consumers are probably used to refreshing Ticketmaster the second tickets go on sale and hoping for the best, Cursed Child rewards those who prepare ahead of time by placing them in a queue. However, once potential ticket buyers have their spot in the Cursed Child queue, they are not necessarily guaranteed to get tickets.

Clicking the link to buy tickets opens up a new queue window, which warns customers that they will only have “five minutes” to make their purchases and that ticket buyers “may purchase up to six tickets for both Part One and Part Two.” This method will hopefully deter scalpers who would attempt to buy up large amounts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets and then place them for sale on ticket resale sites like StubHub.

Fans eagerly joined the queue, hoping to buy tickets to the in-demand play. However, the queue exceeded ticket availability, and many took to Twitter to complain about long wait times and difficulty accessing Cursed Child tickets.

While the queue page does keep track of each customers’ place in the queue and their expected wait times, apparently the tracker was not accurate for some.

Less than an hour after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets went on sale at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, one of the ticket vendors for Cursed Child reported that ticket availability was already incredibly low and that individual tickets would probably be the easiest to come by.

Many fans reported that the booking website would list availability for certain dates and showtimes, but then once they attempted to purchase tickets, they were met with a page proclaiming that there was no availability.

The official announcement that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child had sold out came about an hour later, with tens of thousands of fans still in online queues trying to purchase tickets. ATG Tickets, one of the ticket vendors, announced that more tickets for Cursed Child would be available “in early 2017.”

Unfortunately, even while some fans are still trying to get Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets, scalping and ticket resale websites have already snatched up many tickets. The listings on StubHub for December of 2017 through February of 2018 show quite a few seats for sale, all for several hundred pounds, which is well above face value.

There is still some good news for American Cursed Child fans. The Rowling Library reports that Cursed Child could start performances in New York City on Broadway as early as 2018.

Massive sold-out crowds at the theater aren’t the only successes that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has achieved. The book version of the play, which was written by Jack Thorne, has also received critical accolades. MuggleNet reports that Cursed Child has “been nominated for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards in the Best Fantasy Category… [and] has made it to the final round.”

The awards are fan-voted, and any Harry Potter fans looking to support Cursed Child can vote for it on the GoodReads website here.

Did you attempt to get Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets this morning?

[Featured Image by Rob Stothard/Getty Images]

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