One of the founders of the movie ticketing service Fandango has died following an apparent suicide in New York City.

J. Michael Cline, the co-founder of the movie ticket website and service Fandango, died Tuesday after falling from the balcony of a Manhattan hotel in what the medical examiner’s office ruled as a suicide, according to The New York Times.

Cline co-founded Fandango in 2000 with former chief operating officer Art Levitt during the dot-com boom and became one of the biggest online retailers. Fandango launched with seven movie theater chains, according to Variety.

Fandango found success by completely changing the way people went to the movies. Moviegoers didn’t have to wait in long ticket lines only to find out that the 6 PM showing of Battlefield Earth was already sold out. They could purchase their tickets before they even left home and still have time to buy an overpriced box of Milk Duds and a watered down Shasta.

The company’s flashy orange “F” logo also made it one of the most recognizable online brands in the industry. Cline described his company's whimsical sounding name to Variety as “fast and fun” and a “perfect match to a service designed to make going to the movies easier and more enjoyable than ever before.”

Five years after its launch, online movie ticket sites like Fandango and its competitor Movietickets.com sold tickets worth over $30 million in one year. Comcast bought the Fandango brand in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Fandango also bought some of the Internet’s hottest movie properties such as the aggregated movie review website Rotten Tomatoes in 2017. The movie ticket brand went through subsequent parent sales until it landed with its current owners NBCUniveral and Warner Bros., which expanded the Fandango brand to a streaming service called Fandango at Home as a replacement for Vudu.

Fandango continues to thrive as an online ticket retailer even at a time when movie theaters are seeing a huge slump in sales. During the Barbenheimer craze last summer, Fandango sold 3.5 million tickets alone just to the Oscar nominated and winning films Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Cline left Fandango in 2011 and went on to become the executive chairman of the tech investment firm Juxtapose that helped launch health and wellness companies like Care/of and Corduroy, according to the firm’s website.

Levitt described his former business partner to the New York Times as a formidable entrepreneur who was “a bit of an adventurer” and someone who “saw an opportunity in the market” with Fandango.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 or you can simply dial 988. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.

Ever since the open world hacker adventure game Watch Dogs captured the attention of 2012’s E3, there were rumors circulating of a movie remake before the game even got a release date. Now more than 10 years later, the film version is finally happening. Ubisoft announced today on X that filming has begun on the Watch Dogs movie with a picture of a clapboard and the caption “Lights_Camera_Action.exe.”

The Watch Dogs movie was first announced in 2016 at Sony’s GamesCon press conference, according to IGN. Sony announced that Ubisoft Partners teamed up with New Regency to make a film adaptation of Aiden Pearce’s data-hacking adventure in a metropolis overseen by an intrusive server.

Since then, drips and hints of the movie’s status came and went for years until last month, when Ubisoft posted a press release announcing that production on Watch Dogs would start sometime this summer. The press release also announced that actor Tom Blyth from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sophie Wilde from the sleeper horror hit Talk to Me will star in the Watch Dogs film. The movie is being directed by Mathieu Turi based on a script written by Christie LeBlanc (who wrote the 2021 Netflix sci-fi film Oxygen) with rewrites by Victoria Bata.

A few years ago, there was also talk of turning Watch Dogs and Far Cry, another big Ubisoft franchise, into an animated TV series following a run of the Rabbids Invasion cartoons. However, there’s been nothing but radio silence from those projects ever since then. Maybe if the Watch Dogs movie becomes a hit, the animated series will follow it into production.