Toronto International Film Festival tickets are selling for hundreds of dollars on resale sites

The Toronto International Film Festival is more than a week away, but tickets for some films are already being resold at significantly higher prices.

Tickets for screenings at the festival, which runs from Sept. 7 to 17, have been met with high demand through the festival'sformal vendor Ticketmaster, which has led to a resale market where some single tickets are selling formore than $1,000.

Tickets for the premiere ofDumb Money, a biographical comedy that chronicles the 2021GameStopshort squeeze and features high-profile stars like Pete Davidson, America Ferrera and Seth Rogen are currently being resold on StubHub for upwards of $1,300.

Tickets for the film are currently "sold out" on Ticketmaster.

Tickets forNext Goal Wins, the TaikaWaititi-directed comedy featuring Michael Fassbender and Elisabeth Mossabout the American Samoa soccer team's attempt to make a World Cup, are also being resold for $416.50 on Ticketmaster.

People are taking notice, and they're not happy.

"Ticketmaster is a scourge," reads one post on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, from writer and filmmaker Siddhant Adlakha.

Ticket reselling has become a recurring issue.Ticketmaster came under firing earlier this month for its handling of tickets for Taylor Swift'sEras tour.

Challenge of preventing scalping

Pascal Courty, an economics professor at the University of Victoria, says the issue is being able to ensure that fans are the ones who get tickets without people scooping them upto resell at inflatedprices.

"Some people will try to slide in, and they don't want to go to the concert, but they realize that they can buy low and sell high," hesaid in an interview with CBC News earlier this month. "That's another reason why there would be massive demand and it would be hard to manage."

Courty says he thinks Ticketmaster's verified fan program, a process designed to manage demand, filter bots and avoid high-priced tickets, likely helps prevent some of those people "from just grabbing money."But he also noted that other methods could completely eliminatescalping.

Courty says one way to deter itis to maketickets nominative, like airline tickets, where peoplehave todeclare a name at the time of purchase.

"In the event something happens to you, you can't show up anymore at the last minute, you give the ticket back," he said, noting that in that scenario, someone new would be drawn from a virtual line, and peoplecould access the venue only if they had a ticket and matching ID.

"That system would completely prevent resale for profits because there's no way for this third party to slide in," Courty said, since they would only be able to transfer tickets back to the primary seller.

Neither TIFF or Ticketmaster responded to CBC News's requests for comment.