Moviegoers disappointed by a Hollywood lemon now have a chance to earn refunds for their theater tickets on Facebook.
Payback Time, a Facebook app that launched Monday, lets users unleash their own snarky assessments of movies to earn virtual ticket vouchers. A voting system lets users decide which rants warrant refunds.
The new app is the brainchild of Spill.com, a movie review website that uses animated film critics to riff on the latest box office offerings and ranks movies on a scale from "better than sex" to "some ole bulls**t."
"When you see a movie you hate, there's no recourse," said Jamey Wishner, product manager at Spill.com. "So we said, 'Let's give people the opportunity to entertain a little smack talk of their own. If it's entertaining enough, we can reward them.'"
Payback Time is just one of a seemingly endless list of Facebook applications that let users of the social network do everything from play games to communicate with each other.
Here's how Payback Time works: Disgruntled cinemaphiles fire off a short tirade using the Facebook app and wager the amount they think they deserve to be compensated. The community reads the review and votes on the salience of the commentary and the reasonableness of the reimbursement amount. If the crowd agrees or likes the review, the vexed reviewer is rewarded with virtual money that can be redeemed for a ticket voucher.
So far, only a handful of users are duking it out for tickets on Payback Time, but Wishner and Spill.com founder Korey Coleman are optimistic that once their site's 15,000-plus members and Facebook's 60 million-plus user base hear about the application, they'll be eager to hop on board.
"Rewarding people just for expressing themselves goes a long way," said Wishner. "The more fun people have with it, the more people will use it."
See also:
