“It’s a missed opportunity and unfortunately characterizes the way AOL has mismanaged the Moviefone business for quite a while,” Mr. Jarecki said. “The fact that a lot of people still call — hundreds of thousands a month, from what I have been told — shows that it isn’t some ancient idea.” AOL responded in an emailed statement, “Moviefone is one of the best-known brands in entertainment, and we believe it can mesh seamlessly with AOL’s strategic focus on premium content and video.”

Calls to the 777-FILM lines were already dwindling in 1999, when AOL paid an eye-popping $388 million for the company. But Moviefone was still the leading online ticket seller and by far the dominant movie information brand.

Then theater owners jumped into the fray, creating MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com. Consumers never embraced an AOL effort to recast Moviefone as less of a ticket seller and more of a movie news and information hub. AOL outsourced upkeep of the telephone part of the service, and quality suffered.

Image Andrew Jarecki, a Moviefone founder, said it had been mismanaged and the number of callers showed it still had currency. Credit... Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Mr. Jarecki said he and some partners tried to buy the telephone service back in recent years.

It may be a technological dinosaur now, but 777-FILM was cutting edge for its time. Mr. Jarecki and his associates changed the way many Americans learned about showtimes by creating a reliable automated directory, initially amassing information from 13,000 screens in 31 cities.

“There are very few things that really come to the surface in pop culture and manage to occupy a quirky, special place,” said Mr. Jarecki, who went on to direct the Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans.”

With his deep ringmaster’s voice, Mr. Leatherman’s Mr. Moviefone greeting in particular became part of the cultural firmament. In the 1995 “Seinfeld” episode, Kramer’s new number is similar to 777-FILM, and, when callers start ringing him by mistake, he rises to the challenge and mimics the voice.