ShowQ – Movie Ticket Booking Script with Real Seat Maps, QR E-Tickets, Box Office & Gate Scanner Apps and Cinema Marketplace (Laravel 13)

ShowQ - pick a seat, grab the popcorn

ShowQ is complete movie ticket booking software that installs in two modes: for one cinema company (one theatre or a chain) with its own payment gateway, or as a multi-partner marketplace where theatre partners sell their shows on your website, the platform collects every online payment, keeps a commission and a convenience fee and settles the rest to each partner by statement. Movie-goers pick a city, a movie and a show, choose seats on the real seat map of the screen, pre-order snacks, pay and walk in with a QR e-ticket. The cinema sells at the box office, scans tickets at the gate with a phone camera and runs the F&B counter from phone-friendly counter apps, and manages theatres, screens, a seat layout editor, movies, a bulk show schedule, prices, offers, staff and reports in the theatre admin.

Built on Laravel 13 (PHP 8.3+) with a browser installer - the vendor folder is included, no Composer, Node.js or SSH needed. Both modes run on one domain - no wildcard DNS.

The live demo runs in marketplace mode, so you can try every side: website, booking, customer app, counter apps, theatre admin and super admin. Every demo below opens with one click - no typing needed.

Live demo

• Open the demo website
• Try the seat booking
• Open the e-ticket
• Open the customer app demo
• Open the box office and gate demo
• Open the theatre admin demo
• Open the marketplace super admin demo
• Read the documentation
• Customer login (manual, at /login?with=password): customer@showq.test / password
• Counter staff logins (manual, at /staff/login): boxoffice@showq.test, gate@showq.test, fnb@showq.test / password
• Theatre owner login (manual, at /staff/login): owner@showq.test / password
• Super admin login (manual, at /superadmin/login): admin@showq.test / password

A website that sells seats

City selector and search, a home page with a hero carousel and trailer, quick booking (movie - date - theatre - show), now showing and coming soon with "Notify me", offers strip; movie pages with ratings and reviews, cast and crew, formats and languages and showtimes per theatre; cinemas with amenity filters and theatre pages with seven days of shows; offers, events and fan shows, FAQ and CMS pages. SEO fields, sitemap, robots.txt, schema, Google Analytics 4, AdSense, languages and currencies.

Real seat maps - a seat is never sold twice

• Recliner, gold and silver categories, aisles and gaps, wheelchair and companion spaces, blocked seats - drawn per screen in the seat layout editor
• Pick how many seats, one tap chooses a block; a zoomed panel with big seats on phones
• Seats are held with a timer while the customer pays (database locks and a unique key per show and seat); a payment that arrives after a lost hold is refunded, never overbooked

Snacks, offers and one clear total

Combos, popcorn and drinks of the theatre's menu for pick-up or delivery to the seat, before the show or at the interval; offers and coupons funded by the platform or the cinema; ticket GST included, the convenience fee and its GST shown separately; wallet first, then Razorpay (UPI, cards, net banking), Stripe, PayPal, Paystack, PayHere or bank transfer. Every online payment is verified on the server.

A real movie ticket with a signed QR code

The e-ticket looks like a printed cinema ticket - ticket number, seats, screen, date, time, barcode and QR code. Print or save as PDF, save as an image, add to the calendar (.ics), share or resend by WhatsApp, SMS or e-mail. The customer app keeps upcoming and watched tickets with a full-screen QR mode for the gate, wallet, payments and refunds, offers, "notify me", reviews, favourite cinemas and help.

Box office, gate scanner and F&B counter

• Box office: sell on the same live seat map by cash, card or UPI, print on 80 mm thermal or A4, send the ticket to the customer, look up bookings, cash refunds, cash-up and Z-report
• Gate: scan QR codes with the phone camera or type the code, admit all or some guests, duplicate / wrong show / too early alerts, every scan logged
• F&B: one queue of pre-orders and counter sales, ready and delivered, seat delivery list, sold-out switches, quick counter sale

A theatre admin that shows tonight

Live dashboard (tickets, revenue, occupancy, snacks, occupancy per show, revenue split, today's shows, live seat fill), theatre switcher for chains, bookings with cancellations and refunds, F&B menu with cost and margin, offers, reviews with replies, reports (occupancy, revenue, F&B, box office vs online, GST, refunds) with CSV, payouts or payments, staff with roles per theatre and section, settings and activity log.

Seat layout editor and bulk schedule

• Grid editor with seat, recliner, wheelchair, companion, blocked and aisle tools, row options, numbering, curved rows, categories with colours and default prices, draft and publish - every save is a version and shows keep their version
• Bulk create a movie on several screens, days and times with clash checks; copy last week; price templates and weekday / time rules

Run a cinema marketplace

Theatre companies apply at /partner, complete a go-live checklist with bank details and KYC papers and are verified by you. The platform collects every online payment with its own gateway keys, keeps a commission per partner (% of ticket value or fixed per ticket, + GST) and the convenience fee, and creates settlement statements per cycle (gross - partner discounts - commission - GST - refunds = net), marked paid with the bank reference. Super admin with dashboard, reports, partners and support login, movies master with TMDB import, cities, payments and refunds, platform offers, customers, review moderation, support tickets, website CMS, templates, settings and admin roles.

What you get

• The complete script with the vendor folder and browser installer (MySQL / MariaDB or SQLite)
• Demo data (14 fictional movies, Aurora Cinemas with 3 theatres and 10 screens with seat layouts, shows for the past month and the next two weeks, bookings with snacks, box office sales, gate scans, offers, reviews and 12 months of history; in marketplace mode six more partners, cities and settlement history - sample data) and illustrated HTML documentation

Good to know

• Theatres run their shows in ShowQ itself - there is no connection to external cinema POS or ticketing systems.
• Settlements are calculated and documented; the bank transfer to each partner is made by the platform outside the script and recorded with its reference.
• The TMDB movie import needs your own free TMDB API key; movies can always be added by hand.
• QR codes are scanned with the phone camera in the browser (HTTPS) or typed; there are no Google / Apple Wallet passes - tickets can be printed, saved as PDF or image, added to the calendar and shared.
• The customer and counter apps are responsive web apps (add to home screen); there are no native Android / iOS apps and no public API.
• WhatsApp needs a Meta WhatsApp Cloud API number with approved templates; SMS needs MSG91 or Twilio; e-mail needs SMTP.

Requirements at a glance

PHP 8.3+, MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.3+ (or SQLite), Apache or Nginx, a cron job. No Composer, Node.js or SSH needed.

Support and updates

Support covers installation, configuration and bugs in the item. Server administration and custom development are not included.

Demo note: the live demo runs in marketplace mode with demo mode on - settings, uploads and deletes are disabled, the daily flows (seat booking up to the gateway, box office sales, gate scans, the F&B queue) can be tried, and the demo data resets every 3 hours.

• PHP 8.3 or newer (8.3, 8.4)
• MySQL 5.7+ / 8.x or MariaDB 10.3+ (SQLite 3 for local tests and small installs)
• PHP extensions: pdo (pdo_mysql or pdo_sqlite), mbstring, openssl, tokenizer, xml, ctype, json, fileinfo, curl, gd
• Apache with mod_rewrite (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin) or Nginx; Windows with XAMPP / Laragon
• One cron job every minute (Task Scheduler on Windows)
• HTTPS recommended (webhooks, Google sign-in, gate camera)
• No Composer, Node.js or SSH needed - the vendor folder is included
• Optional accounts: payment gateway merchant accounts, SMTP, MSG91 / Twilio, Meta WhatsApp Cloud API, Google OAuth, TMDB API key

Install

1. Create an empty MySQL / MariaDB database and user in your hosting panel and select PHP 8.3 or newer.
2. Upload the contents of the showq folder (with the hidden .htaccess files) and point your domain to its public folder - or upload it straight into public_html.
3. Open your-domain.com: the browser installer checks the server, asks for the database, lets you choose single cinema company or marketplace and creates your account (demo data optional, imported in short steps so shared hosts do not time out).
4. Sign in at /staff/login (theatre admin) or /superadmin (marketplace) and set up branding, theatres, screens and seat layouts, movies, prices and shows, booking rules and fees, payment gateways, SMTP and WhatsApp / SMS.
5. Add the cron job * * * * * cd /path/to/showq && php artisan schedule:run for seat holds, notify-me messages and settlement statements.

Updates

1. Back up, upload the new files over the old ones (.env, storage and public/uploads are kept), then click Run update in System Update - your data is kept.

The illustrated step-by-step guide (cPanel, VPS / Nginx, Windows and Task Scheduler, both modes and the money flow, installer, every app and role, payments and webhooks, WhatsApp / SMS / SMTP, languages, demo mode, troubleshooting) is in documentation/index.html and online at /codester/docs/index.html.

Version 1.0.0

• Initial release.
• Two install modes: single cinema company or multi-partner marketplace with super admin, partner sign-up and KYC, commission, convenience fee and settlement statements.
• Website with city selector, movies, movie pages and showtimes, cinemas, offers, events and CMS pages.
• Booking on real seat maps with seat holds, snacks pre-order, offers, wallet and payment; QR e-ticket with print / PDF, image, calendar and share.
• Customer app with QR mode; counter apps for box office, gate scanner and F&B with cash-up.
• Theatre admin with dashboard, seat layout editor, bulk schedule, pricing rules, bookings, refunds, F&B menu, offers, reviews, reports, payouts and staff.
• Razorpay, Stripe, PayPal, Paystack, PayHere and bank transfer with server-side verification; WhatsApp Cloud API, SMS, SMTP; Google sign-in; TMDB import.
• Browser installer, demo mode with one-click logins, languages, currencies, six colour palettes, Google Fonts and one-click update.