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Case study
Built to Sync
Software Development
Website Development
Daughter Creative imagined a single home for Canadian movies and showtimes. We engineered it: a custom Rust backend and Next.js frontend that pulls hundreds of theatres and thousands of live showtimes from a web of providers into one fast, always-current platform.
Detail
The brief
Finding a movie in Canada was a chore. Showtimes lived behind a dozen different theatre sites, some of them gated behind logins, and the experience was siloed every step of the way.
Anything outside the blockbusters was harder still. Canadian films, independent cinema and the smaller releases were genuinely difficult to track down, with no real software built to surface them.
Daughter Creative set out to fix that with one destination for the whole country. They built the brand, the visual identity and the entire experience, then brought us in to make it real.
Project partner
Daughter Creative
Daughter Creative led the brand, the visual identity and the whole experience, from the look and feel down to the sitemap. We came in as the development partner to engineer their vision into a living platform.
Daughter Creative
- Brand & Visual Identity
- UX / UI Design
- Sitemap & Structure
Paper Crane
- Strategy Support
- Rust Backend
- Next.js Frontend
- API Integrations
- Hosting & Maintenance
Detail
Built from the ground up
It was clear from the first look at the data that this could not be a content site on a template. Dozens of movies, hundreds of theatres and thousands of showtimes, all changing daily, needed real infrastructure.
So we built the backend in Rust and the frontend in Next.js, two of the most capable tools in modern software. Rust is the same language now trusted inside the Linux kernel, and it gives MovieScout a backbone that is fast, safe and ready to scale. Under the hood:
- A Rust API on Axum, with every database query checked at compile time
- PostgreSQL with PostGIS for real, distance-aware theatre search
- A live sync that pulls movies, showtimes, posters and ticket links from multiple providers
- Image optimization and caching, so every page stays quick across the country
Field note
One platform, built from scratch
At the centre sits a Rust API that does the heavy lifting. It reconciles feeds from MovieGlu, Veezi, Agiletix and Mapbox, stores everything in Postgres, and serves it to a Next.js frontend that stays fast and current.
No template, no off-the-shelf CMS. Every piece was chosen to handle live data at national scale.
Detail
A web of providers
The hardest part was never one API. It was making many of them agree. Each provider describes movies, showtimes and tickets a little differently, so we built a layer that pulls them all in, resolves the conflicts, and de-duplicates the overlap into one clean record.
The result is a catalogue that feels like a single source, even though it is stitched together from several behind the scenes.
Field note
Always current
A daily worker refreshes the catalogue, and the primary feed syncs live, so the showtimes people see are the showtimes that are actually playing. Thousands are kept in step at any moment, with more held in our own database ready to serve.
When the data moves, the site moves with it. No stale listings, no manual updates.
Measured outcomes
By the numbers
A few things from the build we are proud of.
- 500+
- Canadian theatres listed and ordered
- 1,000s
- live showtimes kept in sync at any moment
- 4
- data providers unified into one platform
- EN / FR
- bilingual from the data model up
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Detail
Still building
Launch was a beginning, not an end. MovieScout is live and growing, and we are growing the platform alongside it.
We are adding direct connections to more Canadian point-of-sale and showtime providers, going past the third-party feeds to the source. And we keep making it easier to find a film worth leaving the house for.
In closing
Your vision, engineered.
We partner with studios and teams who bring the design and the ambition, and need a development team that can build something serious underneath it. If that sounds like you, let's talk.
