For a work related project, I've been looking for a decent XML/RSS feed with movie show time data based on ZIP-code. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate exactly what I wanted but I came close. Fandango.com offers a bunch of nice movie XML/RSS feeds that you can easily write an app/widget/whatever to read and parse accordingly. To get a list of all movie theaters and movies playing at those theaters near ZIP-code 10001 (New York, NY):
http://www.fandango.com/rss/moviesnearme_10001.rss
Note you can change the "10001" above to any ZIP code in the US for a theater and movie list. However, the data available through this source conveniently lacks show times, which most custom app developers need. If anyone knows of an XML feed with movie show time data, let me know. Supposedly, Fandango offers an API but I couldn't find any mention of it on their site.
http://www.fandango.com/rss/moviesnearme_10001.rss
Note you can change the "10001" above to any ZIP code in the US for a theater and movie list. However, the data available through this source conveniently lacks show times, which most custom app developers need. If anyone knows of an XML feed with movie show time data, let me know. Supposedly, Fandango offers an API but I couldn't find any mention of it on their site.
FOLLOWUP 4/4/09:
A few weeks ago, I discovered Flixster. Flixster makes a nice iPhone and iGoogle app that displays show times and other movie data based on ZIP code. I dug into the iGoogle app, and found that it gets movie data using the following URL:
http://opensocial.flixster.com/igoogle/showtimes?movie=all&date=0&postal=10001&country=us
Note that you can change the "10001" ZIP code in the URL to get movie showtime data for anywhere in the USA. However, the data from the URL above isn't in XML or JSON format, it's still in HTML. The good news though is that this Flixster page should be easier to "scrape" than say, Fandango.com. To scrape, I've used HTMLcleaner in the past which should work nicely for the Flixster source.
For completeness, here's another solution that scrapes Google and builds a custom RSS feed: http://isnoop.net/rss/theater.php
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a free XML or JSON formatted data source for theaters and movie times. I know the data is aggregated somewhere out there, I'm just not sure who provides it.
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