We can’t imagine the sorrow @sportsbucket_sg — a user on online consumer-to-consumer marketplace Carousell — felt when 40 of their friends bailed on them after they had gone to the trouble of purchasing them all ticket to Avengers: Endgame when seats to screenings of the highly-anticipated superhero epic went on sale yesterday (a superhuman feat in and of itself, considering how crazy high demand sent ticket sales sites crashing).
But while having so many of your friends “disappear” on you is surely a traumatic experience (as Captain America could no doubt tell you), we imagine the Carouseller found some comfort in being able to sell the tickets to others in need — for a healthy profit, of course.
On the ticket sales page, the user wrote, “My friends [couldn’t] make it so I’m selling all below” (womp womp) and then found some way to type through their sorrow to denote that the abandoned tickets would be sold for prices ranging from $120 (US$88) for a pair of ordinary Saturday and Sunday tickets and $300 to $600 for pairs of Gold Class tickets.
The tickets were for multiple Endgame showings at the VivoCity and Plaza Singapore Golden Village cinemas (so apparently his friends were going to watch the movie together across multiple screenings and venues?). Standard tickets at Golden Village usually go for around $11 while Gold Class Endgame tickets have been priced at $62.
Following the news of disappointed Avengers fans being unable to score their own seats during yesterday’s online scrum, word of @sportsbucket_sg’s ticket sale went viral, with some people even having the audacity to accuse the Carouseller of not actually buying the tickets for his friends (or not having any friends) and making up the sad story as a cover for plain-old fashioned ticket scalping.
Among the comments on the sales page: “What a disgrace. Making such huge profits and claiming friends can’t make it. Seriously? Get a proper job and stop this kind of nonsense” and “Now we know why Thanos wiped out half the population..”
Apparently, those comments got to @sportsbucket_sg, who wrote in a second update to the page “Please stop with the hate messages! Willing buyer, willing seller. And most of the tix are being sold to foreign expatriates.”
We’re not exactly sure why they think selling the tickets to expatriates would assuage any of the online backlash, but according to the Carouseller, the hate train didn’t slow down sales, with a third update declaring they had already sold out.
If the accusations about the seller are true and they really didn’t buy the tickets for friends but for profit, then we’d say this level of scalpery falls just below supervillainy. But in that, @sportsbucket_sg isn’t alone as there are plenty of people on Carousell and other sites selling Endgame tickets for hugely inflated prices like this one trying to sell four tickets to an IMAX 3D screening for $1,500. Maybe Thanos was right after all….
Avengers: Endgame premiers in Singapore on April 24.
