Is there a movie showtime api?

Does anyone know of any (preferrably free) supported api's for accessing movie showtimes by zip code?

I don't believe any existing api's, such as netflix or imdb, provide this information.

when "allow_url_fopen" is disabled then use

    <?php
/**
 * Google Showtime grabber
 * 
 * This file will grab the last showtimes of theatres nearby your zipcode.
 * Please make the URL your own! You can also add parameters to this URL: 
 * &date=0|1|2|3 => today|1 day|2 days|etc.. 
 * &start=10 gets the second page etc...
 * 
 * Please download the latest version of simple_html_dom.php on sourceForge:
 * http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/files/
 * 
 * @author Bas van Dorst <info@basvandorst.nl>
 * @version 0.1 
 * @package GoogleShowtime
 *
 * @modifyed by stephen byrne <gold.mine.labs@gmail.com>
 * @GoldMinelabs.com 
 */

require_once('simple_html_dom.php');

$curl = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.google.ie/movies?near=dublin');  
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);  
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);  
$str = curl_exec($curl);  
curl_close($curl);  
 
$html = str_get_html($str);

print '<pre>';
foreach($html->find('#movie_results .theater') as $div) {
    // print theater and address info
    print "Theate:  ".$div->find('h2 a',0)->innertext."\n";
    //print "Address: ". $div->find('.info',0)->innertext."\n";

    // print all the movies with showtimes
    foreach($div->find('.movie') as $movie) {
        print "Movie:    ".$movie->find('.name a',0)->innertext.'<br />';
        print "Time:    ".$movie->find('.times',0)->innertext.'<br />';
    }
    print "\n\n";
}

// clean up memory
$html->clear();
?>

Yep, Yahoo apparently removed their secret movie API in November 2009.
It seems everyone gets their data from TMS Data Direct: http://www.tmsdatadirect.com/

Don't know if Google exposes it as an api but this looks a lot like what you want. http://www.google.com/movies?hl=en&near=90210&dq=movie+times+90210&sa=X&oi=showtimes&ct=title&cd=1

sorry, should've searched a bit more before posting the question.

some http://delicious.com/search?p=api.movies&u=happykylie&chk=&context=userposts&fr=del_icio_us&lc=0">creative searching on del.icio.us has revealed an undocumented yahoo! movies api (http://new.api.movies.yahoo.com/v2/listTheatersByPostalCode?pcode=90210&count=20&yprop=msapi">sample api call).

looks nice.

Fandango seems to have RSS feeds that allow you to search for movies near you.

They can be found here:

https://www.fandango.com/rss/moviefeed

After looking around a little bit, I found Dapper (open.dapper.net) to be a great solution for creating this type of feed...

Here is the feed I made, which takes a movie title and a zip code as parameters. (most others available only searched by ZIP)

http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=GoogleMoviesbynameANDzip

took about 5 minutes to set up...

I too am looking for showtimes I can legitimately scrape and republish. Yahoo's sound like if you don't do it for commercial purposes, it's not prohibited... or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part.

> You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, > copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit > for any commercial purposes, any > portion or use of, or access to, the > Yahoo! Services

Not sure if it's legal to scrape the html from this, but, it's the cleanest pseudo-API I've found. http://opensocial.flixster.com/igoogle/showtimes?date=20111025&postal=23226 - just scrape the html with something like...

$('div.showtime', response).each(function() {
   // ... process each showtime div
});

My guess is that your best bet on that (unless these guys have RSS feeds) would be to scrape the HTML with a language that supports regular expressions.

Mind you, that's ugly and every time they change their code, yours -could- break.

I can't find one.

You could try screen-scraping from Yahoo Movies: <http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes/movie?z=60630&date=20090113&mid=1810038822>

z    = zip code
date = year + month + day (as a string)
mid  = movieID, which you will have to grab from Yahoo Movies

I was also looking for a showtime API, and like you, I have not found a good API for the movie showtimes. I decided to write my own "showtime API", based on the Google Showtimes. Please check it out.

It is a simple PHP-script, but "it does what it should do":

    <?php
/**
 * Google Showtime grabber
 * 
 * This file will grab the last showtimes of theatres nearby your zipcode.
 * Please make the URL your own! You can also add parameters to this URL: 
 * &date=0|1|2|3 => today|1 day|2 days|etc.. 
 * 
 * Please download the latest version of simple_html_dom.php on sourceForge:
 * http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/files/
 * 
 * @author Bas van Dorst <info@basvandorst.nl>
 * @version 0.1 
 * @package GoogleShowtime
 */

require_once('simple_html_dom.phps');

$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load_file('http://www.google.nl/movies?mid=&hl=en&near=1400AB');

print '<pre>';
foreach($html->find('#movie_results .theater') as $div) {
    // print theater and address info
    print "Theate:  ".$div->find('h2 a',0)->innertext."\n";
    print "Address: ". $div->find('.info',0)->innertext."\n";

    // print all the movies with showtimes
    foreach($div->find('.movie') as $movie) {
        print "\tMovie:    ".$movie->find('.name a',0)->innertext.'<br />';
        print "\tTime:    ".$movie->find('.times',0)->innertext.'<br />';
    }
    print "\n\n";
}
       
// clean up memory
$html->clear();

?> 

Example: http:// code.basvd.nl/showtime_grabber_0.1/Google_showtime.php

Download simple_html_dom.php: http:// code.basvd.nl/showtime_grabber_0.1/

I know this is a bit old. I don't think there is an api for this yet but some providers do offer this service. I suggest you look at West World Media.

http://www.google.com/ig/api?movies=YOUR_ZIP_HERE

Thanks to Nick. that's the link I will be using.