Parents who missed out on the past year's toughest concert ticket get a second shot at the Miley Cyrus experience with Disney's
Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert. But they might want to buy their tickets before heading to the movie theater.
Hundreds of weekend screenings — most of them evening shows and Friday after-school matinees — already have sold out. The 3-D concert film, which runs for one week, opens on about 700 screens Friday, the day after Cyrus wraps her North American tour in Miami.
"This event seems to be tailored for advance ticket sales on an online service," says Rick Butler, chief operating officer of Fandango, the nation's largest movie ticketing service.
Butler says the movie made January the most heavily trafficked month in the service's seven-year history, eclipsing last July, when
Transformers and
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opened.
Even with its limited run, Butler predicts
Hannah Montana will be February's highest-grossing movie. Last weekend, advance orders for the film outsold
Meet the Spartans, the weekend's top movie with a gross of $18.5 million. This week, it accounts for more than 90% of Fandango's sales.
Susie Peterson of Bothell, Wash., bought tickets for herself and Haley, her 10-year-old daughter, last month.
"We didn't attend the concert because we couldn't get tickets," Peterson says. "We were thrilled when we heard this movie was coming out."
Cyrus says the 74-minute film will give fans such as Haley the next best thing to the experience of her sold-out tour, which grossed $36 million in 2007.
"We wanted to make it as real, like you were really there, as possible," says the 15-year-old singer, who told
Entertainment Tonight she's changed her legal name from Destiny Hope Cyrus to Miley Ray Cyrus. "Not only do the kids get to see what 20,000 kids a night got to watch, but they also get to see behind the scenes."
As screenings have sold out, many theater owners have added shows.
Plenty of tickets remain available, Butler says, but "there are going to be those exceptions in the metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of population at 7:30 on Friday night."
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