On an Optimal Solution to the Film Scheduling and Showtime Staggering Problem

The scheduling of films is a major problem for the movie theatre exhibition business. The problem is two-fold: movie exhibitors ideally would like to schedule films to screens in their various locations to maximize attendance and revenue, but would also like to schedule these films such that neighbouring theatre locations play the same films at different times thus giving guests a multitude of showtime options. We refer to this latter problem as the showtime \emph{staggering} problem. We give an exact formulation of this scheduling problem using binary integer linear optimization, and provide a solved example as well. This work further shows that the optimal scheduling of films cannot be done across all theatre locations at once, but rather, must be done for each cluster of neighbouring locations.