Live performance venues — theatre, spoken word, comedy — are often ticketed with far less rigour than airlines or cinemas: a simple headcount rather than an actual seat map, which works for general-admission standing shows but breaks down for anything with assigned or tiered seating.
Zuma Theater applies the same seat-map and inventory discipline used in higher-stakes ticketing categories elsewhere on the platform — specific seats or sections held as inventory, released back to availability if not purchased within a hold window, sold once and only once — rather than treating every performance as general admission by default.
Bringing a "harder" category's operational discipline to a "softer" one is a pattern worth applying broadly: just because a category has historically been under-tooled doesn't mean it doesn't deserve the same rigour as a category that's had it from the start. Theatre organisers benefit from the same overselling protection an airline expects, even if nobody had previously built it for them.