Client: AMC Theatres — the largest movie exhibition company in the world, serving millions of guests annually through its digital channels.
Services: Application Modernization, API Modernization, Cloud Migration, Web & Mobile Development, DevOps
“Since 2017, AMC has repeatedly chosen Keyhole Software as a trusted engineering partner—across dozens of projects, multiple SOWs, and numerous extensions—because of our consistent delivery, technical depth, and the measurable impact we bring to their digital ecosystem.”
Overview
AMC Theatres has partnered with Keyhole Software for more than seven years, relying on us to support, modernize, and scale critical components of its digital commerce platform. Over this long-term engagement, Keyhole consultants have worked across multiple business units and engineering groups—sometimes embedding small, highly specialized individuals, and other times supplying full development teams of 7–10 engineers depending on AMC’s needs.
Across these engagements, Keyhole has contributed to major modernization initiatives including .NET and API upgrades, Azure cloud migration, a full Next.js rebuild of the AMC website, mobile application enhancements, performance improvements, and the evolution of high-volume services that power ticketing, concessions, loyalty programs, and subscriptions.
The result is a more reliable, performant, and maintainable digital ecosystem—one that continues to evolve as Keyhole and AMC collaborate across new modernization and cloud-forward initiatives.
Challenges
AMC’s digital ecosystem includes numerous applications and services built over many years. Modernization was essential to:
- Improve performance across a high-traffic digital commerce platform
- Increase reliability of ticketing, concessions, and subscription flows
- Transition from legacy APIs to modern .NET and cloud-ready architectures
- Rebuild the website using modern frameworks and CMS tooling
- Reduce friction caused by aging integrations and legacy patterns
- Improve developer workflows, testing reliability, and deployment safety
The modernization effort required coordinated work across multiple teams, systems, and release cycles while keeping critical customer-facing services online.
Keyhole Software’s Role
Keyhole Software consultants integrated directly into AMC’s engineering teams to support end-to-end modernization across the digital platform. Work spanned API modernization, cloud enablement, Next.js website rebuild, mobile enhancements, and DevOps improvements.
1. API Modernization & Cloud Enablement
Keyhole engineers helped modernize AMC’s API platform, which supports critical business flows including ticket sales, seating layouts, loyalty programs, concessions, third-party delivery, refunds, and payment flows.
Key contributions included:
- Upgrading legacy .NET Framework services to .NET Core and .NET 8
- Refactoring APIs for cloud readiness and containerization
- Assisting with migration to Azure for key services
- Improving Service Bus queue logic for reliability and scale
- Introducing OpenAPI spectral linting to increase API consistency and quality
- Enhancing monitoring and observability using tools such as New Relic and Splunk
These improvements reduced technical debt, increased service reliability, and prepared the platform for future cloud-native initiatives.
2. Website Rebuild with Next.js & Modern CMS
Keyhole consultants played a significant role in the multi-year rebuild of amctheatres.com, transitioning from a legacy JavaScript single-page application to a server-side rendered Next.js architecture.
Project highlights:
- Rewriting user-facing features in Next.js and TypeScript
- Improving speed, accessibility, and overall SEO performance of the site
- Implementing and extending Payload CMS to streamline content editing workflows
- Delivering enhancements for ticketing, checkout, and membership experiences
- Building a Python-based migration tool to import over 2,000+ existing content items
- Updating and modernizing the GraphQL backend, including upgrades to modern Node.js versions
The result was a faster, more scalable, and more maintainable platform that better supports both customers and AMC’s internal content teams.
3. Mobile Application Enhancements
In addition to supporting the client’s mobile rewrite efforts (including work in Xamarin and Flutter), Keyhole consultants continued to support AMC’s mobile platforms by:
- Delivering new features and enhancements in Flutter and legacy mobile codebases
- Improving user flows for loyalty, ticketing, and theatre reservation experiences
- Enhancing notification behavior and improving application stability
- Detecting and resolving issues across iOS and Android
These updates supported a smoother transition to a modern mobile stack while maintaining stable, high-quality experiences for end users.
4. Payments & Third-Party Integrations
Keyhole engineers also supported the stability and evolution of several key integrations, including:
- Payment processing and membership management flows
- Subscription and loyalty functionality
- Concessions and food ordering experiences
- Integrations with external partners and services
New internal tools and enhancements—such as sandbox-style testing services—helped improve QA velocity and reduce dependency on external providers during development and testing cycles.
Technology Snapshot
- Web & Backend: .NET 8, .NET Core, C#, Node.js, GraphQL, Next.js, TypeScript, Payload CMS
- Mobile: Flutter, Dart, Xamarin
- Cloud & DevOps: Azure, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy
- Databases: SQL Server, MongoDB
- Monitoring & Observability: New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus
Collaboration & Delivery Approach
Keyhole Software consultants joined AMC’s teams as embedded contributors, collaborating closely with internal engineering, QA, content, and operations teams. Engagements followed a mix of Agile and Kanban workflows, with:
- Shared pull request and code review processes
- Joint ownership of release planning and deployment pipelines
- Slack-based communication and cross-team coordination
- Alignment across web, mobile, and backend engineering groups
This blended team structure supported continuous delivery, consistent quality, and feature parity across platforms.
Results & Business Impact
- Improved performance, reliability, and scalability across AMC’s digital commerce ecosystem
- Reduced technical debt through targeted application modernization and refactoring
- Faster, safer release cycles via enhanced CI/CD pipelines and cloud adoption
- More efficient content management through Payload CMS and automated content migration
- More stable customer experiences across ticketing, loyalty, and purchasing journeys
- A stronger modernization foundation for ongoing cloud-native development
AMC has continued to extend its partnership with Keyhole Software across multiple streams of digital transformation work, leveraging Keyhole’s expertise in .NET modernization, Next.js development, API modernization, Flutter development, and Azure cloud migration.
About Keyhole Software
Keyhole Software is a custom software development and consulting firm specializing in enterprise application modernization, cloud-native solutions, API design, and web and mobile development. Our consultants integrate directly with client teams to solve complex technical challenges and deliver scalable, maintainable software that drives real business value.
