I saw Star Trek today and was given a little treat as I walked into the theater.

I used Fandango. I bought the tickets online, and then printed them using Fandango’s machine stationed in the movie theater lobby. Instead of getting the usual ticket and receipt, I was given this little extra:

Watchment movie ticket for 03/09/09, printed on 05/29/09.

Watchmen movie ticket for 03/09/09, printed on 05/29/09. (Taken w/ iPhone)

It was a ticket for Watchmen! Not only is Watchmen out of theaters, but the date the movie was intended to be shown was March 9th. If you look closely, on the bottom of each stub, you’ll see a printing date of May 29th — way past the showing date.

So the question is: Did Fandango’s machine erroneously print me an extra ticket, leading to this little tidbit? Or did I pay for a ticket I never picked up?

The world may never know.

It’s beautiful. Take a look.

fandango-error

I got to it using Fandango’s search box in the top right hand corner twice in a row. The first time I searched for something that returned no results (try “Court St.”, as if you want to search for a theater on Court St.). The second time I used the box to search for something else, like “Star Trek”.

Not a huge error, but I’m always a fan of professional error messages.