Fact-Checking Jimmy Fallon’s Claim That His Haunted House Is Selling Out

While the late-night talk show industry may be circling the drain, the business of Halloween-themed cash grabs continues to thrive. 

Which would explain why Jimmy Fallon has spent much of this month hyping his various seasonal side hustles, including the children’s book 5 More Sleeps ‘til Halloween. Fallon even held up a QR code that links to online stores selling the book on his show. We never thought we’d long for the subtlety of his cartoon monkey NFT pitch.

Most bizarrely, Fallon is actively promoting his upcoming “haunted maze experience” known as Tonightmares, which purportedly brings “Jimmy’s nightmares to life.” That means that the attraction will be full of killer robots, zombies, and, we can only assume, Rolling Stone investigative reporters.

In a recent episode of his QVC show — sorry, I mean, talk show — Fallon predictably promoted the spooky maze, this time by sharing his nightmare about a “sinister werewolf.” Again, Fallon held up a QR code, and encouraged viewers to get tickets because it’s “selling out fast.”

Play

Is it though? 

While we have no way of knowing exactly how many tickets for this thing have sold, as of this writing, it doesn’t appear as though any dates or times have actually sold out. Plenty of days have a “low availability” designation, but right now we’re still able to select any date and time and purchase a ticket. 

Even this Friday’s big opening seemingly has yet to fully sell out any of the time slots from 5 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. The event closes at 11 p.m., presumably so attendees can make it home for The Tonight Show at 11:35 p.m.

Okay, sure it’s still early, but what about October? Well, it looks pretty much the same. 

Even Halloween, which one would assume would be the busiest night of all for haunted attractions, has every time slot available. I was able to grab tickets for October 31st at 9 p.m.. Of course, I didn’t go through with the purchase, because A) I don’t live in New York, and B) even if I did, I probably wouldn’t want to spend Halloween night inside a manifestation of the tortured psyche of the guy from Taxi.

Again, it’s hard to say exactly how many tickets have sold, or what the capacity of the maze actually is, but it does appear as though Fallon’s implication that tickets could be gone soon was a tad hyperbolic. 

It’s understandable that not everyone would want to attend Tonightmares, considering that it costs around $40 per ticket, which is significantly more than other haunted houses in the area, such as Blood Manor. Not to mention the fact that Fallon’s only other attraction, Universal Studios’ “Race Through New York” has been called an “atrocity” by some theme park fans.

It remains to be seen whether or not the maze will actually be scary, or if all the scare actors will be breaking character and giggling the whole time.

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).