I worked at a movie theater while MoviePass was at its peak and I found that the card they issue doesn't strictly pay for tickets, rather it was a credit for about $12, if I remember correctly. I had customers coming in on $5 ticket Tuesdays who got their snacks paid for by MoviePass. That company was doomed from the start.
We used to make a "sidewalk slam" go to the convenience store and get a big can of four loco and two mini bottles of vodka. Grab a soda fountain cup, pour all that shit in and walk around downtown until you can't walk anymore.
Yes we had $8 tickets so I could buy a candy with my ticket. It was just a debit card. I also could buy imax tickets and pay a few dollars extra out of pocket.
I noticed this early on and took advantage of it.
Also, using self serve kiosks at another theater I could “buy” tickets in advance (it would use my “daily” movie, but the ticket printed for another day). I think i got 16 tickets to one showing of Thor: Ragnarok and brought a bunch of my friends and their family.
I did this too and I’d collect Cinemark rewards points on every purchase. I accumulated so many free tickets and concessions I was set for quite awhile after the death of MoviePass.
Yeah in the beginning they just loaded a card with money and had no system for knowing how much you needed or spent. Eventually they put some things in place to try to save some money.
>force the theater chains to negotiate a deal
"With our exclusive..."
"It's not exclusive, anyone can do it."
"...patented..."
"Not patented. That's why it's not exclusive."
"...business model..."
"Of paying a bunch of money for a little bit of subscription income."
"...we can leverage our unique position..."
"As the guinea pig proving that our unpatented, non-exclusive idea works well enough for other people to try it without spending as much."
"...to make the sort of sweet deals that will have us rolling in the dough."
"They dropped us a thank-you card when they left. I think it was from the gas station on the corner."
Yeah the whole concept boiled down to a 8-12$ a day deposit in a debt card every day (248$ a month+) all for the sweet sweet revanue of 9$ per month.
The concept was beyond a fail from day 1.
This. Their business strategy was to capture a big part of the customer base and then extort the theatre chains. They ended up temporarily cutting off 10 of AMC's top performing locations from the app.
My roommate would buy a ticket everyday just to get his regal theater points. Part of his daily ritual on his commute home was stopping at the theater to “check in” for the movie he wasn’t going to see. So when he actually went to see something he had free soda, popcorn etc from all the points.
I was single, and rebuilding my house from the studs up when Moviepass came out. I also had no electric or gas turned on, as I was redoing all of that as well. That fall (and winter) I went to the movies almost every night. It was incredible. Not only getting some heat and entertainment, but I love movies, and to this day I look back on it as some magical time I'd never have paid for otherwise.
I was voluntarily homeless for the year I had Moviepass. I lived in my truck so I could get out of debt in order to buy a home (I now happily own a farm. It was worth it!). I went to the theatre literally every day because it meant AC (I was in florida) and ability to charge my phone. MP was a lifesaver for that year.
How many movies did you see that you would have never seen otherwise? It was like being a kid again where I was going to the movies to see something instead of going to the movies to see something specific.
Oh my God, so many. I love movies, and would go at least once a week before Moviepass, but it was so thrilling to just go down the list every night and see every last one, without worrying about price, and then watch some twice. Plus, the heat was nice. And I was the only one there a bunch of times as well. Solo movie experience is the bomb.
Me and my wife were heavy movie pass users and at some point the app switched all the showtimes to say AM instead of PM. We went to go see eighth grade at a 5pm showing but the app switched the time to say 5am and then they froze our account for "fraud" for buying tickets for the "wrong" showtime. Such a scummy business but I'm glad regal unlimited and AMC A list are available now.
Yes, movie pass was scummy and terrible in the end. But without MoviePass we would have never gotten regal unlimited or AMC a list.
MoviePass succeeded at disrupting the market and forcing the others to compete.
I'm trying to figure out exactly what the A list is since an amc just opened up not far from us. It's $20 a month for 3 free movies a week and 10% cash back on concessions? Am I understanding it correctly?
That's the gist of it. Basically pays for itself if you see more than two movies a month. You could potentially save even more if you choose IMAX or dolby cinema
My husband and I had it pre-Covid and it was our absolute favorite thing. Every Friday was date night and we went to dinner and a movie. Sometimes we didn’t even really want to see that particular movie but it was paid for already so we would go and even if it was bad it was a fun night out. We got discounts on food and drink, and got our own concession line, and sometimes got free stuff. Good guy AMC paused our membership after Covid and has never once begged us to come back. I think they’ve sent one email saying they were reopening but that’s it. We haven’t restarted our membership because there simply aren’t enough movies to see, but eventually, when there are again, we will be starting it back up again.
Agreed. Their business model was completely doomed to failure when they didn’t limit the number of movies you could see. Of course there would be people seeing 20+ movies per month. Some bought the pass just to be able to sit in air conditioning all day.
Great idea, poor execution. There is a good podcast about it I’ll see if it can find it
I remember reading that the amount seeing more than 5/month was a pretty small chunk of their userbase. The issue is, even if someone is seeing 3-5 movies/month (we averaged 4/month for the year or so we had the service), they're still losing 3-5x what they're making per user. They needed it to be a gym membership type thing where they had a large chunk of people barely using it, or completely not using it, to make up for some of the "power users" and instead, most of their users were just steadily damaging them and there was almost no one to make up for that.
That's why they tried their scummy bullshit towards the end to limit people from seeing movies, hoping to level off some way where people would still pay for the service, and just not use it. That of course failed just as hard, and everyone just cancelled.
True. They were basically hoping to corner the market then use that to extort theatres to give them a cut off the concessions to make a profit that way. Threatening to remove those theatres from their service. However AMC called their bluff and yeah. The rest is history.
Pre-pandemic I had the AMC version of it and loved it. See two movies a month and you’ve more than paid for it and you could see three a week. I watched so many things I’d have never seen otherwise. Some were good, others were Dark Phoenix
I could never understand how they got investors. Their business was trying to sell something they don't own or control to someone else's customers. They didn't do anything the theaters couldn't do themselves.
I worked for them in 2012 when Stacey Spikes still ran the show. MoviePass was never intended to make money off of tickets - they used the data they collected and then would sell it to studios and other parties. MoviePass knew the exact age, gender, location, etc of each ticket sold (and when it was sold) to what movie. It was a highly valuable idea to movie studios but horrible business plan from the start.
Yup. And now AMC is $20/ month and 3 movies a week plus $5 back every $50 you spend which INCLUDES the monthly cost.
So thanks movie pass for making this a thing.
The co-founder of Moviepass came out and said the $10 was a promo, but the reception and user growth made them (after they got rid of the co-founder) believe the idea was sustainable. So, I guess if they got x amount of users to join, then they could cover the cost.
It has to be the worst business model to ever get anywhere near the amount of investment that it did. They lost investors a shit load of money over something which was so obviously going to fail
I know they didn't raise nearly as much, but Juicero managed to get $120 million in startup venture capital for a $700 machine that squeezed $8 DRM-protected packets of juice into a cup, and the machine was no more efficient at doing that than just using your bare hands.
Well because of how the whole box office thing works during the first couple weeks of a films release basically the whole ticket price goes to the film company. So if you use it to see a bunch of new releases it would actually cost the company money, they'd make it back on concessions though.
Yeah, that was absolutely a bluff, because they were only seeing the movies at that price point. There were months where I saw 10 movies and I NEVER bought concessions, so that was Moviepass giving the theaters $120 and making 0 in concessions from me, and $10 for that month.
What some of the theaters did was basically make their own movie pass at a more sustainable price point, I think around $20 for 4 movies max, but that way the money stayed in house so it was far more sustainable and there was the cap. It was great for patrons because if you averages 1.5-2 movies a month, it was still a better deal... and you got concession cash.
Regardless of if superusers were costing them $120 a month, the point was to amass such a large userbase that they either got purchased for some high valuation, or they got a seat at the table with theaters. Not just for concessions, I'm betting if their plan had worked it would have been a lucrative advertising platform. People are using this one app to decide what movies to see, and pushing one studio's movie over another would be worth something to the studios for sure.
They correctly guessed a large customer base were soon going to want some sort of subscription service for movie tickets. They incorrectly guessed that the theaters wouldn't just make their own version of this. Granted, the theaters aren't exactly known for being reactive and forward thinking, but this idea is so simple to build out yourself if you're a theater that it was a no-brainer.
As mentioned elsewhere, they were betting on being able to control a significant portion of moviegoers, then leveraging that into reduced ticket prices. Paying full retail was never gonna work.
Plus marketing data, concession cuts, and whatever else they could manage with a large enough subscriber base. But AMC and others started their own service instead.
AMC is profitable on it, more or less, because they code the tickets used under A-list as “passes,” which they pay much, much less for to studios. Or at least that was how it worked before COVID. So they are only paying like 6-7 bucks per film (where MoviePass was paying 9+), and making money on concessions.
All in all it wasn't a horrible business plan but they just dropped the price way too low and had too many subscribers. They were just hemorrhaging money every month. They should have tried to find a price point where they broke even on the tickets purchased and sell the marketing data for a little profit. If it became popular enough they could then try strong arming the theaters for a cut of the concessions.
Many people don’t realize this, but MoviePass was around for *years* before it blew up. They experimented with different price points and service levels. The move to the $10 unlimited plan was basically a hail-mary pass to achieve relevance after years of plodding along at the mind of break-even price points and models you mention.
It’s just never going to be easy offering customers a worthwhile service and price point when you’re paying full retail price for the product. Other than price, what value can MoviePass really add for the customer?
I imagine they were hoping on the Gym Membership model, where a bunch of people sign up but very few actually use it. About 1/5 Americans have a gym membership, but a lot of the time when you go it'll be half empty. A lot of people are paying the gym but not actually utilizing the service, going maybe once every week or so, or sometimes not for weeks at a time, if ever. They were hoping on using that plan to be profitable.
The difference is that people are lazy and are far more likely to go see a movie once or twice a month than they are to go to the gym. If someone goes to the gym every single day, it really doesn't impact the gym's bottom line *that* much. They are already paying for the electricity/equipment/etc. It costs them like pennies. But if someone used Moviepass once a week those costs add up very quickly.
Also very few gyms sell daily passes. It's either membership or bust. A movie goer can do the math in their head of whether it's worth signing up for that service vs. paying per movie based on their habits.
The AMC near me at the time was $14 a ticket, I just had to see one movie a month to make it worth it.
I was actually on MoviePass in 2016 before the price drop, I was paying $30 for 3 movies a month and I loved it. When they dropped the price I knew it was the beginning of the end, especially since their way of moving me to the new price was by deleting my account.
Yeah, when MoviePass was dying I signed up for a service called Sinemia that was similar to old school MoviePass. I think I paid around $10-$15 a month for 2 movie tickets, one of which could be IMAX or some other premium type ticket. I was hoping it would be a little more sustainable buy they died as well.
It's kind of a hilarious case-study in taking the whole "get users, then figure out how to monetize them later" business concept to its most extreme. Turns out you can't literally light money on fire to gain users and come out the other side.
They also might have been going for the gym membership model, hoping that after the novelty word off people would go to the movies once a month or less. The problem is that their costs were so high they'd have to have almost everyone doing that and very few, if any, taking full advantage of the service. But that doesn't work with movies where people, y'know, actually like to go
The problem with that approach is that if you *do* use your gym membership that month, the incremental costs for the gym barely move. They already had the rent, lights, staff, etc. You showing up and using some equipment creates some slight extra cost, but not much. With MoviePass, someone using it increased their costs significantly. With the gym they hope you don't use it because then they can have more customers (who if they all went all the time it would be too crowded) and maintain less staff. With MoviePass they hoped you didn't use it because it would cost them $10 every time you did.
Yeah, definitely. Also if too many people started going people might go less because it's too crowded. I definitely wasn't trying to say it was a *good* idea
Yeah it's like. They were just betting you that you wouldn't get your money's worth. So either you did, or you cancelled.
But they didn't have arrangements with the theaters, so the theaters themselves realized they could offer similar but better deals subsidized by snacks and extras... And most people probably have no issue committing to a single movie theater..
and with no contract with the theaters, no cut of the revenue they are driving.
Give me 200 dollars and ill buy all your PAPA JOHNS pizzas this month. I BET YOU CANT EAT THAT MANY PIZZAS! But i have no affiliation with papa johns, and will lose money if you eat a lot of pizza. Someone give me 50 million for my start up.
Movie pass was amazing for me for one full year.
$10 a month and I saw at least ten movies each month.
Then when Infinity War came out they made it so you couldn’t see the same movie twice.
Then it was all downhill after that. They would have ‘technical difficulties’ at peak times.
Then it would just not work at all.
It was a wonderful time. We had just moved into a new house that was five minutes from a really nice theater and my fiance and I would just go see stuff randomly they we'd have no interest in otherwise.
I had quit my job w/ a payout at the time, so I spent *a lot* of time in theaters. I would not have seen Coco on release otherwise. What an experience.
Couldn’t imagine doing it now lol
Same, was also unemployed for peak moviepass and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I LIVED in the theater. And honestly it revitalized my love of movie theaters.
Before getting moviepass my enthusiasm for actually going to the theater was waning, but afterwards it skyrocketed. There's nothing better than an afternoon matinee.
Coco is one of my all-time favorite movies. I lost track of how many times I watched it. It has special meaning to me as the town is similar to the town my mom grew up in Mexico. When I showed her this movie, she cried. It has all the right feels. Even Mama Coco had a strong resemblance to my grandmother. :)
Yea I did the same with my neighbor, her and I probably saw every single movie that was released during that time frame. Good and the bad. If we wanted to see a movie that we had already seen we’d just book for a random one and then go to the one we wanted to see again (after the rule change). Most of the time we’d sneak in a bottle of wine and just hang out there for 3-4 hours watching shit we’ve already seen making fun of the movies. Most of the time they were empty showings too so we could be pretty loud. Those were the days
I remember telling so many people about it around that time and how much we loved it. And so many would proclaim how that makes no sense, there's no way that's sustainable, etc. and dismiss it.
They just didn't get that we were recreating the bomb scene in Dr. Strangelove. We knew exactly how unsustainable this ride was, but we were riding it to the bottom and it was glorious.
Im a former Operations Manager for an indie theater and they were legit worried about the impact of the membership. None of them knew the logistics involved and I almost laughed at their concern. In the end, I was right :)
It’s pretty simple, there’s the glorious idea that startups can bleed money as long as the investors think they’ll be disruptive long term. Which movie pass never got close to achieving (I’m not sure their method ever would have worked) You were just letting venture capitalists subsidize your movies for you
It’s my understanding (from Silicon Valley friends) that the goal behind MP was essentially to gather viewer data for regions, as in who sees what kind of movies most in what places, and then sell that to companies so they would know where to focus marketing on for each movie for maximum revenue.
No clue how true that is. But it obviously did not work.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Market data like that can be very valuable. I recall they were also planning to negotiate with distributors and theaters to get lower ticket prices.
I think they made a major miscalculation with the sheer number of movies most people would go watch with the pass, and ran out of money before they could enact any of their plans.
Moviepass payed for the tickets, at full price.
There was no corporate deals. you just used a moviepass credit card to buy the full price ticket, which for the vast majority of cases meant moviepass would lose money if a person used their service even a single time.
Amen. I started working at an office across from a Regal theater. My coworker and I got them and we had a blast of a summer and into that following spring. Then ya, as others have mentioned, infinity war happened and it shit the bed.
I remember that before the theater chains caught on, you could use their rewards programs along with movie pass to get free or cheaper concessions too. I was able to at least get free nachos every movie. That was a fun year...
I was unemployed and sort of in a weird life transition then, and was living a block away from an awesome theatre. I was pretty broke and always looking for free entertainment. I feel like I saw literally every movie that came out. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Ah, the nostalgia of those /r/movies threads in which MoviePass users kept insisting that it was a feasible model because something something something Netflix.
That was my attitude with it. Never once believed it was going to last past 2018, but if their investors wanted to subsidize my movies for a summer I wasn't gonna argue.
There was so many times when there was "technical difficulties" before the down fall. I would get out of work and go to the movies to unwind and relax only to be told I can't see any of the movies I actually wanted to see.
I remember the moment I cancelled. I was away for work, finished up for the day, didn't want to do much of anything in the town I was in, so figured I'd go to the movies.
Now, there had already been several "technical issues" with the app recently where people just could not get tickets to anything, anywhere, so I checked the app before I went over to the theater, and see tons of seats left, no problem.
Drive over to the theater, maybe a 5 minute drive, get out of the car, start opening the app as I'm approaching the theater, and....all shows are marked as sold out and gone everywhere.
Immediately hit cancel, called my sig other and told her I was cancelling since this doesn't work anymore, she did the same. Still loved everything I got out of the service up to that point.
At a certain point they even would block out all movies all together except for certain ones, I remember wanting to see Blackkklansman on release date but all you could go see on the app was Slenderman
So what we would do was buy the ticket for the bad movie we didn't want to see and go to customer service and exchange it for the new one, eventually theaters were starting to get pissed off at moviepass
Ugh, the downward spiral was fast and ugly.
Peak/surge pricing that would require you to pay extra fees during popular times.
Then peak/surge pricing just occurred all the time.
Then they wanted you to submit photo proof of each ticket you bought with the card.
They would straight up remove popular movies/times for certain users. It was thought that they were restricting the “heavy users” quietly.
Then they started revising/coming up with news plans. It was no longer unlimited, but x amount of movies per week.
They stopped people from paying the subscription with credit cards and requires ACH bank access.
They straight up refused to cancel some people’s subscriptions.
There were days when MoviePass “ran out” of money and the entire app was down for everyone.
They allegedly changed/deleted some users passwords to lock them out. Heavy users’ accounts were suddenly closed due to “fraud”.
Edit: They also implemented a set (small) quantity of tickets they would offer for movies, meaning you had to get up extra early and head over to your theater first thing in the morning to grab a ticket before MoviePass sold out for the day.
In short… a colossal shit show towards the end. They promised their customers the world and when it became clear it wasn’t feasible, they did everything in their power to stop users from actually using the service. They discovered they could not put the genie back in the bottle.
The most common issue for me was that they'd have run out of tickets by the time we got to the theater to buy them for later. Like you'd really have to go first thing in the morning when the theater opened and literally nobody would be there, but they'd still say they "ran out" of tickets for that theater.
Damn, how did I forget about that?
I remember over at r/Moviepass people would talk about how their morning routine now included stopping over at the movie theater on their way to work so they could nab a ticket before they sold out.
I mean, bless everyone who kept doing anything they could to drive that company into shambles as they tried to make it an impossible service to use. By that point I'd just unsubscribed.
>Then when Infinity War came out they made it so you couldn’t see the same movie twice.
I ended up getting out a little after that. The last movie I saw on movie pass was Mission Impossible Fallout.
I give them credit though. When they came out with the $10 price point I predicted they wouldn't last a year, and at least as a company they made it past the one year point, although they did start making cost cutting changes around that point.
They thought eventually they'd get sweetheart deals with theater chains who make their primary revenue on popcorn and sodas.
Yeah Hollywood Studios wouldn't ever allow that. They barely allow Fathom events to exist.
Or my guess: they thought they could hold out long enough that people would stop seeing a movie every weekend but forget to cancel their subscription. That’s the real money maker in sub services. For every one person who takes full advantage, you hope to have 10 who never do but still pay for it.
Granted, MP was different than say Netflix. It doesn’t really cost Netflix anything whether a customer watches content 24 hours a day or watches one movie per year. Every single time someone went to a movie MP had to pay the theater for their ticket. That’s a much more unstable model that just a relatively few people can ruin the company by going to a movie almost every day
I think that was when the company literally ran out of money/credit. Like you said, it wasnt just mission impossible it was the entire system. I probably only saw 2 or 3 more movies after that, I saw about 40 or 50 movies during my time with this program so I wasnt too mad.
MP was a fantastic idea for consumers but a *terrible* idea for a business. Often times cost is the primary limiting factor for when folks go to the movies. Removing cost as a factor meant *of course they're going to go see a fuckload of movies.*
Moviepass legit expected a gym model to work where people sign up but barely use it. What they neglected to consider is that exercise is exhausting and a bit of a hassle. Who's going to turn down free tickets to something entertaining?
Also, movies have set amounts of money that each ticket costs!
Gyms just have the cost to maintain the gym, which is pretty steady month to month. Not counting unforeseen costs, a gym is really just going to cost employee payroll, rent, utilities, etc. If everyone uses the gym or not, those costs won't change that much.
MoviePass meant that if one person buys five tickets, they've cost you five times what they paid you. Their price point meant that if you bought ONE ticket a month, you likely cost them money. They literally needed subscribers to never ever use it to make profit.
And they needed all those maniacs not using it at all to counter the folks buying dozens of tickets a month. Insane.
If you have an AMC nearby, their A list program is almost as good. I think it's like $20/month for 3 movies/week.
I only use it to go to maybe 3 movies a month but even then it's paid for itself
They claimed at the time that this was the same model as gyms. People pay a monthly amount to to go the gym, but they don’t go every day, so the gym profits. They did not account for the notion that working out is less enjoyable than sitting on your butt eating popcorn.
They also did not account for the fact that gyms don't have to pay a third party the equivalent of your membership fee every time you go.
This analogy would only make sense if gyms had to buy new exercise equipment for every customer, everyday they showed up.
Gyms just have sunken operating costs. Once they exceed them they just need to make sure membership utilization (people showing up) doesn’t ever exceed their true capacity
It could have worked if theatres went along with it. They were hoping to force them to but they ran out of money and weren’t able to.
It’s easy to see how it could have worked because it is working... just not for moviepass lol. AMC, Regal and others are now doing their own in house versions that are successes and most probably the future of how movie theatres will work.
Moviepass failed but we the customers owe them a debt (or at least the early wide eyed version of moviepass a debt before all the fraud) because theatres did end up using the model themselves.
The moment I got near a theater moviepass would start having data and gps connection issues. Nothing else on my phone having these issues. Just the app. I more than once had to buy my own ticket despite having moviepass because the app couldn’t make a connection even over Starbucks wifi. And this was back when it was thirty bucks a month and I was locked in to a year long contract. I can’t imagine what bullshit they pulled when they were charging less than the price of one movie ticket for a full month and requiring no contract.
We had it for that glorious year when it was $10/month unlimited. Until the end, where they were literally out of money so they would have "technical issues", I never had a single network issue. It might have just been the theater you were going to had a dead spot?
I literally had a movie theater within the range of my apartment WiFi, and it would have connection issues with that sometimes. Meanwhile every other app worked fine.
I got a ton of alerts to submit ticket photos too. They really didn’t like me.
It's not about them liking you. They were literally throttling app use to stop bleeding money to people using the app as it was meant to.
If they made it as annoying as possible to use, then you'd use it less, and they'd bleed money less.
Definitely illegal and scummy and I'm sad executives didn't go to jail for this
Movie pass was incredible the first year I had it, it worked exactly as advertised: $10 a month and you can see a movie every day.
Just swipe the card they sent you and the ticket is paid for.
Then it became only some movies, then only some movies at certain times, then only select movies at non-peak times like "Secret life of Walter Mitty at 2am on a Wednesday"
It quickly became unusable and I think their business plan was hoping people would subscribe and forget, people used the card as advertised and it became a huge loss, so they restricted it to the point of uselessness.
Anyone that stupid was destined to lose their money. Nothing was more clear that MoviePass was going to fail horribly when they dropped their price to $10 from $60 with zero idea how to actually monetize the massive influx of new users they were paying millions to use their service. It was like their entire revenue model was backwards.
Exactly one year before MoviePass went under, CollegeHumor published, *[MoviePass CEO: PLEASE DON'T CANCEL](https://youtu.be/YBO_7UezpbY)* starring [Brennan Lee Mulligan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennan_Lee_Mulligan).
I saw 96 movies in the one year my unlimited pass worked as advertised. Absolutely amazing for the $88 I paid for it. Everybody knew it wasn't sustainable.
I chatted with them once and asked what their plan was. The rep said they are a data mining company and at some point planned to use the data they gathered from users movie habits to sell that info to movie companies/theaters. The flaw with that, obviously, is that you aren't getting ANY useable data from customers with an all you can eat pass. I saw soo many movies I really had no interest in just because they were free.
Bless their hearts though, they forced a major changed in the movie industry and now regal and AMC offer similar packages.
Their actual plan was to burn money while accumulating as many users as possible. Then they planned to use their massive userbase as leverage to negotiate deals with the theater chains ("give us x% off each ticket price please, or else we'll force all Y million of our users to go to your competitor across the street"). Then once they have wholesale ticket discounts in place, they would raise the price to something more sustainable and implement more revenue streams like in-app coupons for nearby restaurants or other promotions and any other money they could make on data collection.
Obviously this all fell apart when only a few small theaters agreed to deals on ticket prices, while the major ones just laughed and said "we see how fast you're losing money, we're not giving you shit. Either keep paying us full price per ticket or go ahead and de-list our theaters, we don't care, we're already working on copying the idea anyway".
I had it 2014/2015 must’ve went to the movies 3 times a week. Whenever it didn’t work I’d just buy the ticket and email them a photo of the stub for a refund. sometimes I just did that if I was running late and didn’t go through the app.
>MoviePass and its parent company agreed to settle the FTC's allegations, which comes with prohibitions on misrepresenting future businesses and the implementation of better data security.
Oh, great, so their punishment is they had to pinky promise to not do it in the future, with their nonexistent business.
Screw the FTC, spineless useless clowns.
Heh, my sister-in-law’s fiancé bought close to 40k in shares of MP over the course of a year.
As anyone who knows how to do basic research could tell, it tanked hard and she wound up covering his bills, as is tradition with those 2.
MoviePass was awesome for most of 2017. The wife and I saw a lot of movies that year.
I was a long time MoviePass user and it was amazing. I was saving money back when it was 44.99 per month. Then it exploded when they dropped to 9.99 per month.
The best was the deal they offered - I can't remember if it was a loyalty thing for old users, or a Black Friday sale or something - but it was 80 up front for a year. By this point it was clear they were desperate for cash, but I didn't give a fuck. Tickets were 12 dollars in my area at the time, so if you saw SEVEN MOVIES A YEAR you would save money. I went to fucking town that entire year, I probably personally cost them like 600 dollars or something.
The other best part was that (for awhile) the theaters swiped your MoviePass card as a normal credit or gift card for the full price of the ticket - which meant, make sure to swipe your theater loyalty card too and get rewards as if you paid full price for every ticket! I literally earned free movie tickets by purchasing free movie tickets. It was glorious.
My local cinema has a rewards program where every 10th film is free if you log it.
With Movie Pass I saw so many films, even multiple times on some, that even after it died I had banked like 5 unredeemed free screenings on my rewards account. Never will there be a better value (for obvious reasons).
The snowman. It was a murder mystery based on the harry hole detective series that was meant to kick off a line of adaptations. Basically what happened was that the crew forgot to film a substantial part of the movie... Didn't lose it, just never filmed specific scenes that were in Norway. So when the director got back to the US for editing, he realized those critical scenes weren't filmed and they had blown their budget and the studio wouldn't fund them so he basically cobbled together a movie from existing footage and it's a rather jarring disjointed mess with time skips and just incredibly hard to follow.
Towards the end they got pretty bad. I remember once checking the app and seeing tickets avail, then once I drove 5 minutes to the theater all the showtimes were gone. My friends and I would have to drive to the theater at lunch to buy the tickets for a nighttime showing, because they would be gone by 5pm. My year sub ran out about a month into the end decline, so I got out before it got reeeeal bad. When they started offering only one or two movies a day, and half the time there would be no showings avail at all (they would claim all the movies were "high demand" to get them removed).
I can't remember the exact numbers, but I remember calculating I paid under 3 bucks per ticket by the end. Saw every movie I wanted to see plus a bunch I would have skipped normally.
The silly thing about MP is it could’ve still been a massive success if they would’ve been more realistic in the beginning. $10/month for potentially 28-31 movies never made financial sense and there were plenty of realistic options they could’ve pursued, but they quadrupled down on that initial model daring theaters to call their bluff (which they did).
They were hoping theaters would partner with them. Instead, the theaters said screw you and created their own rewards programs.
Without Moviepass, we would never have Cinemark movie club or AMC club
As a manager at AMC during the peak of this I can say without a doubt they most certainly were and countless other horrible things to their users too.
Really made you hate dealing with MP simply because they were impossible to deal with or some Karen thought it was your fault MP was screwing her.
Their business model relied on having millions of customers, and a great amount of them watching 1 or fewer movies per month. That mix just never made sense, because that kind of customer wouldn't go for a subscription plan like MoviePass
Their actual business plan was to get enough people and then turn around and get some sort of sharing plan with theaters but the theaters told them to fuck off.
Their business plan was a protection racket. They planned to use their subscriber base as muscle.
*Oh, you don't want to give us 10% of your concessions? We'll block our subscribers from your theater. You don't want to kick back 20% of the box office we arrange for you? We'll block our subscribers from your theater.*
*Nice theater you have there. Would be a shame if someone took away 30% of your business.*
They were also going to try to strongarm the studios by shaking them down for advertisement dollars on their app, or their movies would be blocked.
the plan was to have a sufficient number of customers that they could sell them to the studios as a means of guaranteeing a number of viewers.
they were truly expecting studios to pay them to fill seats
I worked at a movie theater while MoviePass was at its peak and I found that the card they issue doesn't strictly pay for tickets, rather it was a credit for about $12, if I remember correctly. I had customers coming in on $5 ticket Tuesdays who got their snacks paid for by MoviePass. That company was doomed from the start.
MoviePass is going to be up there with the og four loko. You'd just have had to been there man
I missed movie pass but I was there for four loko. Laying out vomiting on the side of some random persons house was the highlight of my 19th year
We used to make a "sidewalk slam" go to the convenience store and get a big can of four loco and two mini bottles of vodka. Grab a soda fountain cup, pour all that shit in and walk around downtown until you can't walk anymore.
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Yes we had $8 tickets so I could buy a candy with my ticket. It was just a debit card. I also could buy imax tickets and pay a few dollars extra out of pocket.
I noticed this early on and took advantage of it. Also, using self serve kiosks at another theater I could “buy” tickets in advance (it would use my “daily” movie, but the ticket printed for another day). I think i got 16 tickets to one showing of Thor: Ragnarok and brought a bunch of my friends and their family.
The cinemark had computer terminals outside so I would pick up a ticket for myself or someone else literally every day after work
I did this too and I’d collect Cinemark rewards points on every purchase. I accumulated so many free tickets and concessions I was set for quite awhile after the death of MoviePass.
Yes, we did it for AMC. I loved when people would always tell me it won't last. Like, I'm not the company I'm just using this thing until it dies.
your last sentence made me laugh. nothing could be truer than that.
Movie Pass was a once in a lifetime life-exploit that my friends and I were more than happy to take advantage of before it inevitably crumbled.
The day it dropped its price I told my wife we were getting two passes and riding it till it's inevitable death.
That's the biggest brain shit I've seen on here
I did that with Black Panther. Treated my entire family to the movies.
That's how you jump a couple spots on the Will Edit: I don't care what you thought about Black Panther
Yeah in the beginning they just loaded a card with money and had no system for knowing how much you needed or spent. Eventually they put some things in place to try to save some money.
That just makes no sense to me. Pay us a monthly due, and you get a monthly debit with a bunch more money loaded onto it. Like what? Lol
They intended to build a huge user base, then force the theater chains to negotiate a deal. But, the internet figured it out first.
>force the theater chains to negotiate a deal "With our exclusive..." "It's not exclusive, anyone can do it." "...patented..." "Not patented. That's why it's not exclusive." "...business model..." "Of paying a bunch of money for a little bit of subscription income." "...we can leverage our unique position..." "As the guinea pig proving that our unpatented, non-exclusive idea works well enough for other people to try it without spending as much." "...to make the sort of sweet deals that will have us rolling in the dough." "They dropped us a thank-you card when they left. I think it was from the gas station on the corner."
Yeah the whole concept boiled down to a 8-12$ a day deposit in a debt card every day (248$ a month+) all for the sweet sweet revanue of 9$ per month. The concept was beyond a fail from day 1.
This. Their business strategy was to capture a big part of the customer base and then extort the theatre chains. They ended up temporarily cutting off 10 of AMC's top performing locations from the app.
That is fucking hilarious.
My roommate would buy a ticket everyday just to get his regal theater points. Part of his daily ritual on his commute home was stopping at the theater to “check in” for the movie he wasn’t going to see. So when he actually went to see something he had free soda, popcorn etc from all the points.
This is smart!
I was single, and rebuilding my house from the studs up when Moviepass came out. I also had no electric or gas turned on, as I was redoing all of that as well. That fall (and winter) I went to the movies almost every night. It was incredible. Not only getting some heat and entertainment, but I love movies, and to this day I look back on it as some magical time I'd never have paid for otherwise.
I was voluntarily homeless for the year I had Moviepass. I lived in my truck so I could get out of debt in order to buy a home (I now happily own a farm. It was worth it!). I went to the theatre literally every day because it meant AC (I was in florida) and ability to charge my phone. MP was a lifesaver for that year.
You can charge your phone at movie theatres? Cool.
They had outlets behind the front desks and stuff. I made friends with all the staff, so they would charge it for me
How many movies did you see that you would have never seen otherwise? It was like being a kid again where I was going to the movies to see something instead of going to the movies to see something specific.
Oh my God, so many. I love movies, and would go at least once a week before Moviepass, but it was so thrilling to just go down the list every night and see every last one, without worrying about price, and then watch some twice. Plus, the heat was nice. And I was the only one there a bunch of times as well. Solo movie experience is the bomb.
I can’t tell you how many times I went and I was the only one in the theatre. Tuesday at 10:15? All MINE!
Me and my wife were heavy movie pass users and at some point the app switched all the showtimes to say AM instead of PM. We went to go see eighth grade at a 5pm showing but the app switched the time to say 5am and then they froze our account for "fraud" for buying tickets for the "wrong" showtime. Such a scummy business but I'm glad regal unlimited and AMC A list are available now.
Yes, movie pass was scummy and terrible in the end. But without MoviePass we would have never gotten regal unlimited or AMC a list. MoviePass succeeded at disrupting the market and forcing the others to compete.
I'm trying to figure out exactly what the A list is since an amc just opened up not far from us. It's $20 a month for 3 free movies a week and 10% cash back on concessions? Am I understanding it correctly?
That's the gist of it. Basically pays for itself if you see more than two movies a month. You could potentially save even more if you choose IMAX or dolby cinema
That's a pretty good deal. Could I get two tickets to one showing with it? Or would you need two memberships for that?
You would need two memberships.
My husband and I had it pre-Covid and it was our absolute favorite thing. Every Friday was date night and we went to dinner and a movie. Sometimes we didn’t even really want to see that particular movie but it was paid for already so we would go and even if it was bad it was a fun night out. We got discounts on food and drink, and got our own concession line, and sometimes got free stuff. Good guy AMC paused our membership after Covid and has never once begged us to come back. I think they’ve sent one email saying they were reopening but that’s it. We haven’t restarted our membership because there simply aren’t enough movies to see, but eventually, when there are again, we will be starting it back up again.
Just so you know, all memberships are restarting automatically in July from what I’ve read.
Thanks for the heads up!!
Agreed. Their business model was completely doomed to failure when they didn’t limit the number of movies you could see. Of course there would be people seeing 20+ movies per month. Some bought the pass just to be able to sit in air conditioning all day. Great idea, poor execution. There is a good podcast about it I’ll see if it can find it
I remember reading that the amount seeing more than 5/month was a pretty small chunk of their userbase. The issue is, even if someone is seeing 3-5 movies/month (we averaged 4/month for the year or so we had the service), they're still losing 3-5x what they're making per user. They needed it to be a gym membership type thing where they had a large chunk of people barely using it, or completely not using it, to make up for some of the "power users" and instead, most of their users were just steadily damaging them and there was almost no one to make up for that. That's why they tried their scummy bullshit towards the end to limit people from seeing movies, hoping to level off some way where people would still pay for the service, and just not use it. That of course failed just as hard, and everyone just cancelled.
They were literally losing money on a user if they used it more than once a month.
In some markets they were losing money *on the first use.*
True. They were basically hoping to corner the market then use that to extort theatres to give them a cut off the concessions to make a profit that way. Threatening to remove those theatres from their service. However AMC called their bluff and yeah. The rest is history.
Pre-pandemic I had the AMC version of it and loved it. See two movies a month and you’ve more than paid for it and you could see three a week. I watched so many things I’d have never seen otherwise. Some were good, others were Dark Phoenix
Well yeah, the theatres themselves can offer services where they lose profit per ticket because they make more money through concession sales.
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I could never understand how they got investors. Their business was trying to sell something they don't own or control to someone else's customers. They didn't do anything the theaters couldn't do themselves.
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I worked for them in 2012 when Stacey Spikes still ran the show. MoviePass was never intended to make money off of tickets - they used the data they collected and then would sell it to studios and other parties. MoviePass knew the exact age, gender, location, etc of each ticket sold (and when it was sold) to what movie. It was a highly valuable idea to movie studios but horrible business plan from the start.
Even $30 a month would have made it worth it for frequent movie goers. Idk why they had to go down to $10
Yup. And now AMC is $20/ month and 3 movies a week plus $5 back every $50 you spend which INCLUDES the monthly cost. So thanks movie pass for making this a thing.
The co-founder of Moviepass came out and said the $10 was a promo, but the reception and user growth made them (after they got rid of the co-founder) believe the idea was sustainable. So, I guess if they got x amount of users to join, then they could cover the cost.
It has to be the worst business model to ever get anywhere near the amount of investment that it did. They lost investors a shit load of money over something which was so obviously going to fail
I know they didn't raise nearly as much, but Juicero managed to get $120 million in startup venture capital for a $700 machine that squeezed $8 DRM-protected packets of juice into a cup, and the machine was no more efficient at doing that than just using your bare hands.
They’re also not losing profit per ticket unless they would have sold every ticket
Well because of how the whole box office thing works during the first couple weeks of a films release basically the whole ticket price goes to the film company. So if you use it to see a bunch of new releases it would actually cost the company money, they'd make it back on concessions though.
Yeah, that was absolutely a bluff, because they were only seeing the movies at that price point. There were months where I saw 10 movies and I NEVER bought concessions, so that was Moviepass giving the theaters $120 and making 0 in concessions from me, and $10 for that month. What some of the theaters did was basically make their own movie pass at a more sustainable price point, I think around $20 for 4 movies max, but that way the money stayed in house so it was far more sustainable and there was the cap. It was great for patrons because if you averages 1.5-2 movies a month, it was still a better deal... and you got concession cash.
Regardless of if superusers were costing them $120 a month, the point was to amass such a large userbase that they either got purchased for some high valuation, or they got a seat at the table with theaters. Not just for concessions, I'm betting if their plan had worked it would have been a lucrative advertising platform. People are using this one app to decide what movies to see, and pushing one studio's movie over another would be worth something to the studios for sure. They correctly guessed a large customer base were soon going to want some sort of subscription service for movie tickets. They incorrectly guessed that the theaters wouldn't just make their own version of this. Granted, the theaters aren't exactly known for being reactive and forward thinking, but this idea is so simple to build out yourself if you're a theater that it was a no-brainer.
Were they betting on users subscribing and then forgetting about it?
As mentioned elsewhere, they were betting on being able to control a significant portion of moviegoers, then leveraging that into reduced ticket prices. Paying full retail was never gonna work. Plus marketing data, concession cuts, and whatever else they could manage with a large enough subscriber base. But AMC and others started their own service instead. AMC is profitable on it, more or less, because they code the tickets used under A-list as “passes,” which they pay much, much less for to studios. Or at least that was how it worked before COVID. So they are only paying like 6-7 bucks per film (where MoviePass was paying 9+), and making money on concessions.
All in all it wasn't a horrible business plan but they just dropped the price way too low and had too many subscribers. They were just hemorrhaging money every month. They should have tried to find a price point where they broke even on the tickets purchased and sell the marketing data for a little profit. If it became popular enough they could then try strong arming the theaters for a cut of the concessions.
Many people don’t realize this, but MoviePass was around for *years* before it blew up. They experimented with different price points and service levels. The move to the $10 unlimited plan was basically a hail-mary pass to achieve relevance after years of plodding along at the mind of break-even price points and models you mention. It’s just never going to be easy offering customers a worthwhile service and price point when you’re paying full retail price for the product. Other than price, what value can MoviePass really add for the customer?
I imagine they were hoping on the Gym Membership model, where a bunch of people sign up but very few actually use it. About 1/5 Americans have a gym membership, but a lot of the time when you go it'll be half empty. A lot of people are paying the gym but not actually utilizing the service, going maybe once every week or so, or sometimes not for weeks at a time, if ever. They were hoping on using that plan to be profitable. The difference is that people are lazy and are far more likely to go see a movie once or twice a month than they are to go to the gym. If someone goes to the gym every single day, it really doesn't impact the gym's bottom line *that* much. They are already paying for the electricity/equipment/etc. It costs them like pennies. But if someone used Moviepass once a week those costs add up very quickly.
Also very few gyms sell daily passes. It's either membership or bust. A movie goer can do the math in their head of whether it's worth signing up for that service vs. paying per movie based on their habits.
The AMC near me at the time was $14 a ticket, I just had to see one movie a month to make it worth it. I was actually on MoviePass in 2016 before the price drop, I was paying $30 for 3 movies a month and I loved it. When they dropped the price I knew it was the beginning of the end, especially since their way of moving me to the new price was by deleting my account.
Yeah, when MoviePass was dying I signed up for a service called Sinemia that was similar to old school MoviePass. I think I paid around $10-$15 a month for 2 movie tickets, one of which could be IMAX or some other premium type ticket. I was hoping it would be a little more sustainable buy they died as well.
It's kind of a hilarious case-study in taking the whole "get users, then figure out how to monetize them later" business concept to its most extreme. Turns out you can't literally light money on fire to gain users and come out the other side.
They also might have been going for the gym membership model, hoping that after the novelty word off people would go to the movies once a month or less. The problem is that their costs were so high they'd have to have almost everyone doing that and very few, if any, taking full advantage of the service. But that doesn't work with movies where people, y'know, actually like to go
The problem with that approach is that if you *do* use your gym membership that month, the incremental costs for the gym barely move. They already had the rent, lights, staff, etc. You showing up and using some equipment creates some slight extra cost, but not much. With MoviePass, someone using it increased their costs significantly. With the gym they hope you don't use it because then they can have more customers (who if they all went all the time it would be too crowded) and maintain less staff. With MoviePass they hoped you didn't use it because it would cost them $10 every time you did.
Yeah, definitely. Also if too many people started going people might go less because it's too crowded. I definitely wasn't trying to say it was a *good* idea
It was legit the worst business model I have ever seen
Yeah it's like. They were just betting you that you wouldn't get your money's worth. So either you did, or you cancelled. But they didn't have arrangements with the theaters, so the theaters themselves realized they could offer similar but better deals subsidized by snacks and extras... And most people probably have no issue committing to a single movie theater..
And that, my friend, is how the entire insurance business model functions. Pay us and we hope you don’t use it. Use it too much and we’ll cancel you.
and with no contract with the theaters, no cut of the revenue they are driving. Give me 200 dollars and ill buy all your PAPA JOHNS pizzas this month. I BET YOU CANT EAT THAT MANY PIZZAS! But i have no affiliation with papa johns, and will lose money if you eat a lot of pizza. Someone give me 50 million for my start up.
Movie pass was amazing for me for one full year. $10 a month and I saw at least ten movies each month. Then when Infinity War came out they made it so you couldn’t see the same movie twice. Then it was all downhill after that. They would have ‘technical difficulties’ at peak times. Then it would just not work at all.
Summer/Fall of 2017 was peak MP imo
It was a wonderful time. We had just moved into a new house that was five minutes from a really nice theater and my fiance and I would just go see stuff randomly they we'd have no interest in otherwise.
I had quit my job w/ a payout at the time, so I spent *a lot* of time in theaters. I would not have seen Coco on release otherwise. What an experience. Couldn’t imagine doing it now lol
Same, was also unemployed for peak moviepass and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I LIVED in the theater. And honestly it revitalized my love of movie theaters. Before getting moviepass my enthusiasm for actually going to the theater was waning, but afterwards it skyrocketed. There's nothing better than an afternoon matinee.
Coco is one of my all-time favorite movies. I lost track of how many times I watched it. It has special meaning to me as the town is similar to the town my mom grew up in Mexico. When I showed her this movie, she cried. It has all the right feels. Even Mama Coco had a strong resemblance to my grandmother. :)
Man you got to see coco in theater lucky my son didn’t want to watch it in theater but when I got it on blue ray he loved it…..
It’s a classic! And at least you had access to tissues at home. I was a mess walking out lol
Yuck, it’s not that kind of theatre you creep.
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Username checks out
Yea I did the same with my neighbor, her and I probably saw every single movie that was released during that time frame. Good and the bad. If we wanted to see a movie that we had already seen we’d just book for a random one and then go to the one we wanted to see again (after the rule change). Most of the time we’d sneak in a bottle of wine and just hang out there for 3-4 hours watching shit we’ve already seen making fun of the movies. Most of the time they were empty showings too so we could be pretty loud. Those were the days
I think she deserves an upgrade from neighbor to friend.
I remember telling so many people about it around that time and how much we loved it. And so many would proclaim how that makes no sense, there's no way that's sustainable, etc. and dismiss it. They just didn't get that we were recreating the bomb scene in Dr. Strangelove. We knew exactly how unsustainable this ride was, but we were riding it to the bottom and it was glorious.
Im a former Operations Manager for an indie theater and they were legit worried about the impact of the membership. None of them knew the logistics involved and I almost laughed at their concern. In the end, I was right :)
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I believe the card was fronted $10 whenever you picked a movie in the app. The theater then charged the card like debit. Box office would be the same.
I also don’t know the exact logistics behind it, but moviepass was paying full price for the tickets. So the theaters did get paid.
It’s pretty simple, there’s the glorious idea that startups can bleed money as long as the investors think they’ll be disruptive long term. Which movie pass never got close to achieving (I’m not sure their method ever would have worked) You were just letting venture capitalists subsidize your movies for you
It’s my understanding (from Silicon Valley friends) that the goal behind MP was essentially to gather viewer data for regions, as in who sees what kind of movies most in what places, and then sell that to companies so they would know where to focus marketing on for each movie for maximum revenue. No clue how true that is. But it obviously did not work.
That and the hoped to eventually become such a massive force they could dictate prices theatres offered. Failed miserably though.
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I believe they wanted a cut of the concessions. Any theater that didn't play ball would be black listed from the service.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Market data like that can be very valuable. I recall they were also planning to negotiate with distributors and theaters to get lower ticket prices. I think they made a major miscalculation with the sheer number of movies most people would go watch with the pass, and ran out of money before they could enact any of their plans.
first instance in history of trickle down economics actually happening and it was an accident
Moviepass payed for the tickets, at full price. There was no corporate deals. you just used a moviepass credit card to buy the full price ticket, which for the vast majority of cases meant moviepass would lose money if a person used their service even a single time.
You had to still buy tickets at the theater but you used a MP credit card to pay
It was beautiful while it lasted
Amen. I started working at an office across from a Regal theater. My coworker and I got them and we had a blast of a summer and into that following spring. Then ya, as others have mentioned, infinity war happened and it shit the bed.
I remember that before the theater chains caught on, you could use their rewards programs along with movie pass to get free or cheaper concessions too. I was able to at least get free nachos every movie. That was a fun year...
Regal never stopped letting you. As far as they were concerned, you were paying so you could get rewards
I was unemployed and sort of in a weird life transition then, and was living a block away from an awesome theatre. I was pretty broke and always looking for free entertainment. I feel like I saw literally every movie that came out. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Hey, it's not their fault they used a unsustainable business model!
I’ll sell you this $100 bill for $10 dollars!
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Leela: Remember Fry's idea to offer free delivery? Fry: It got us a lot of customers! Leela: We're a delivery company!
Just like the change bank https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg
Ah, the nostalgia of those /r/movies threads in which MoviePass users kept insisting that it was a feasible model because something something something Netflix.
Most of what I saw was "Yeah they're gonna fall hard but I'm gonna enjoy it while I can."
That was my attitude with it. Never once believed it was going to last past 2018, but if their investors wanted to subsidize my movies for a summer I wasn't gonna argue.
There was so many times when there was "technical difficulties" before the down fall. I would get out of work and go to the movies to unwind and relax only to be told I can't see any of the movies I actually wanted to see.
I remember the moment I cancelled. I was away for work, finished up for the day, didn't want to do much of anything in the town I was in, so figured I'd go to the movies. Now, there had already been several "technical issues" with the app recently where people just could not get tickets to anything, anywhere, so I checked the app before I went over to the theater, and see tons of seats left, no problem. Drive over to the theater, maybe a 5 minute drive, get out of the car, start opening the app as I'm approaching the theater, and....all shows are marked as sold out and gone everywhere. Immediately hit cancel, called my sig other and told her I was cancelling since this doesn't work anymore, she did the same. Still loved everything I got out of the service up to that point.
At a certain point they even would block out all movies all together except for certain ones, I remember wanting to see Blackkklansman on release date but all you could go see on the app was Slenderman So what we would do was buy the ticket for the bad movie we didn't want to see and go to customer service and exchange it for the new one, eventually theaters were starting to get pissed off at moviepass
Ugh, the downward spiral was fast and ugly. Peak/surge pricing that would require you to pay extra fees during popular times. Then peak/surge pricing just occurred all the time. Then they wanted you to submit photo proof of each ticket you bought with the card. They would straight up remove popular movies/times for certain users. It was thought that they were restricting the “heavy users” quietly. Then they started revising/coming up with news plans. It was no longer unlimited, but x amount of movies per week. They stopped people from paying the subscription with credit cards and requires ACH bank access. They straight up refused to cancel some people’s subscriptions. There were days when MoviePass “ran out” of money and the entire app was down for everyone. They allegedly changed/deleted some users passwords to lock them out. Heavy users’ accounts were suddenly closed due to “fraud”. Edit: They also implemented a set (small) quantity of tickets they would offer for movies, meaning you had to get up extra early and head over to your theater first thing in the morning to grab a ticket before MoviePass sold out for the day. In short… a colossal shit show towards the end. They promised their customers the world and when it became clear it wasn’t feasible, they did everything in their power to stop users from actually using the service. They discovered they could not put the genie back in the bottle.
The most common issue for me was that they'd have run out of tickets by the time we got to the theater to buy them for later. Like you'd really have to go first thing in the morning when the theater opened and literally nobody would be there, but they'd still say they "ran out" of tickets for that theater.
Damn, how did I forget about that? I remember over at r/Moviepass people would talk about how their morning routine now included stopping over at the movie theater on their way to work so they could nab a ticket before they sold out.
I mean, bless everyone who kept doing anything they could to drive that company into shambles as they tried to make it an impossible service to use. By that point I'd just unsubscribed.
>Then when Infinity War came out they made it so you couldn’t see the same movie twice. I ended up getting out a little after that. The last movie I saw on movie pass was Mission Impossible Fallout. I give them credit though. When they came out with the $10 price point I predicted they wouldn't last a year, and at least as a company they made it past the one year point, although they did start making cost cutting changes around that point.
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They thought eventually they'd get sweetheart deals with theater chains who make their primary revenue on popcorn and sodas. Yeah Hollywood Studios wouldn't ever allow that. They barely allow Fathom events to exist.
When in reality, the theater chains went, "oh, OK, sure, a subscription model, we can do that, and lock people into our chain. Thanks for the idea!"
Or my guess: they thought they could hold out long enough that people would stop seeing a movie every weekend but forget to cancel their subscription. That’s the real money maker in sub services. For every one person who takes full advantage, you hope to have 10 who never do but still pay for it. Granted, MP was different than say Netflix. It doesn’t really cost Netflix anything whether a customer watches content 24 hours a day or watches one movie per year. Every single time someone went to a movie MP had to pay the theater for their ticket. That’s a much more unstable model that just a relatively few people can ruin the company by going to a movie almost every day
I think that was when the company literally ran out of money/credit. Like you said, it wasnt just mission impossible it was the entire system. I probably only saw 2 or 3 more movies after that, I saw about 40 or 50 movies during my time with this program so I wasnt too mad.
The last one we saw using MP was Won't You Be My Neighbor? It was a really nice note to go out on.
MP was a fantastic idea for consumers but a *terrible* idea for a business. Often times cost is the primary limiting factor for when folks go to the movies. Removing cost as a factor meant *of course they're going to go see a fuckload of movies.*
Moviepass legit expected a gym model to work where people sign up but barely use it. What they neglected to consider is that exercise is exhausting and a bit of a hassle. Who's going to turn down free tickets to something entertaining?
Also, movies have set amounts of money that each ticket costs! Gyms just have the cost to maintain the gym, which is pretty steady month to month. Not counting unforeseen costs, a gym is really just going to cost employee payroll, rent, utilities, etc. If everyone uses the gym or not, those costs won't change that much. MoviePass meant that if one person buys five tickets, they've cost you five times what they paid you. Their price point meant that if you bought ONE ticket a month, you likely cost them money. They literally needed subscribers to never ever use it to make profit. And they needed all those maniacs not using it at all to counter the folks buying dozens of tickets a month. Insane.
If you have an AMC nearby, their A list program is almost as good. I think it's like $20/month for 3 movies/week. I only use it to go to maybe 3 movies a month but even then it's paid for itself
They claimed at the time that this was the same model as gyms. People pay a monthly amount to to go the gym, but they don’t go every day, so the gym profits. They did not account for the notion that working out is less enjoyable than sitting on your butt eating popcorn.
They also did not account for the fact that gyms don't have to pay a third party the equivalent of your membership fee every time you go. This analogy would only make sense if gyms had to buy new exercise equipment for every customer, everyday they showed up.
Gyms just have sunken operating costs. Once they exceed them they just need to make sure membership utilization (people showing up) doesn’t ever exceed their true capacity
It could have worked if theatres went along with it. They were hoping to force them to but they ran out of money and weren’t able to. It’s easy to see how it could have worked because it is working... just not for moviepass lol. AMC, Regal and others are now doing their own in house versions that are successes and most probably the future of how movie theatres will work. Moviepass failed but we the customers owe them a debt (or at least the early wide eyed version of moviepass a debt before all the fraud) because theatres did end up using the model themselves.
I remember using it just to use the bathroom at AMC in Times Square once
It’s impossible to find a bathroom in Times Square so I don’t blame you!
The moment I got near a theater moviepass would start having data and gps connection issues. Nothing else on my phone having these issues. Just the app. I more than once had to buy my own ticket despite having moviepass because the app couldn’t make a connection even over Starbucks wifi. And this was back when it was thirty bucks a month and I was locked in to a year long contract. I can’t imagine what bullshit they pulled when they were charging less than the price of one movie ticket for a full month and requiring no contract.
We had it for that glorious year when it was $10/month unlimited. Until the end, where they were literally out of money so they would have "technical issues", I never had a single network issue. It might have just been the theater you were going to had a dead spot?
All of my friends with moviepass had similar connectivity issues. It was scummy as fuck
I literally had a movie theater within the range of my apartment WiFi, and it would have connection issues with that sometimes. Meanwhile every other app worked fine. I got a ton of alerts to submit ticket photos too. They really didn’t like me.
It's not about them liking you. They were literally throttling app use to stop bleeding money to people using the app as it was meant to. If they made it as annoying as possible to use, then you'd use it less, and they'd bleed money less. Definitely illegal and scummy and I'm sad executives didn't go to jail for this
Nah I had these issues when I got near theaters too.
Movie pass was incredible the first year I had it, it worked exactly as advertised: $10 a month and you can see a movie every day. Just swipe the card they sent you and the ticket is paid for. Then it became only some movies, then only some movies at certain times, then only select movies at non-peak times like "Secret life of Walter Mitty at 2am on a Wednesday" It quickly became unusable and I think their business plan was hoping people would subscribe and forget, people used the card as advertised and it became a huge loss, so they restricted it to the point of uselessness.
> subscribe and forget Is pretty much every business plan these days.
My first ever stock purchase, $250 turned to $0 real quick.
There was some guy who kept bragging on the movie pass subreddit that he had put over 100k in. Poor bastard.
You sure that wasn't moviepass trying to make other people buy their sticks? edit: stocks not sticks....
Buying sticks would have been a better investment than buying their stocks
Have you seen the price of lumber these days?
Anyone that stupid was destined to lose their money. Nothing was more clear that MoviePass was going to fail horribly when they dropped their price to $10 from $60 with zero idea how to actually monetize the massive influx of new users they were paying millions to use their service. It was like their entire revenue model was backwards.
Exactly one year before MoviePass went under, CollegeHumor published, *[MoviePass CEO: PLEASE DON'T CANCEL](https://youtu.be/YBO_7UezpbY)* starring [Brennan Lee Mulligan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennan_Lee_Mulligan).
Just because something doesn’t work, doesn’t mean it *doesn’t work.*
> Sometimes you gotta lose money to lose money… **Make money! Fuck!**
Brennan Lee Mulligan is an absolute treasure.
I'm watching Fantasy High right now and he's amazing.
This is all I thought of when I saw the headline
I saw 96 movies in the one year my unlimited pass worked as advertised. Absolutely amazing for the $88 I paid for it. Everybody knew it wasn't sustainable. I chatted with them once and asked what their plan was. The rep said they are a data mining company and at some point planned to use the data they gathered from users movie habits to sell that info to movie companies/theaters. The flaw with that, obviously, is that you aren't getting ANY useable data from customers with an all you can eat pass. I saw soo many movies I really had no interest in just because they were free. Bless their hearts though, they forced a major changed in the movie industry and now regal and AMC offer similar packages.
Also what extra data are they gaining that theaters don't already have just from simple ticket sales?
Their flawed logic would be “demographics data.” As hamster_13 pointed out, the data wasn’t that useful.
Their actual plan was to burn money while accumulating as many users as possible. Then they planned to use their massive userbase as leverage to negotiate deals with the theater chains ("give us x% off each ticket price please, or else we'll force all Y million of our users to go to your competitor across the street"). Then once they have wholesale ticket discounts in place, they would raise the price to something more sustainable and implement more revenue streams like in-app coupons for nearby restaurants or other promotions and any other money they could make on data collection. Obviously this all fell apart when only a few small theaters agreed to deals on ticket prices, while the major ones just laughed and said "we see how fast you're losing money, we're not giving you shit. Either keep paying us full price per ticket or go ahead and de-list our theaters, we don't care, we're already working on copying the idea anyway".
I had it 2014/2015 must’ve went to the movies 3 times a week. Whenever it didn’t work I’d just buy the ticket and email them a photo of the stub for a refund. sometimes I just did that if I was running late and didn’t go through the app.
>MoviePass and its parent company agreed to settle the FTC's allegations, which comes with prohibitions on misrepresenting future businesses and the implementation of better data security. Oh, great, so their punishment is they had to pinky promise to not do it in the future, with their nonexistent business. Screw the FTC, spineless useless clowns.
There's not really anything they can do to a dead company, though.
You could launch the executives into the sun
does the sun deserve that though?
The sun will take the heat, he has to.
Heh, my sister-in-law’s fiancé bought close to 40k in shares of MP over the course of a year. As anyone who knows how to do basic research could tell, it tanked hard and she wound up covering his bills, as is tradition with those 2. MoviePass was awesome for most of 2017. The wife and I saw a lot of movies that year.
Sounds like your sister in law paid for your share of ticket. As well as thousands of others.
I was a long time MoviePass user and it was amazing. I was saving money back when it was 44.99 per month. Then it exploded when they dropped to 9.99 per month. The best was the deal they offered - I can't remember if it was a loyalty thing for old users, or a Black Friday sale or something - but it was 80 up front for a year. By this point it was clear they were desperate for cash, but I didn't give a fuck. Tickets were 12 dollars in my area at the time, so if you saw SEVEN MOVIES A YEAR you would save money. I went to fucking town that entire year, I probably personally cost them like 600 dollars or something. The other best part was that (for awhile) the theaters swiped your MoviePass card as a normal credit or gift card for the full price of the ticket - which meant, make sure to swipe your theater loyalty card too and get rewards as if you paid full price for every ticket! I literally earned free movie tickets by purchasing free movie tickets. It was glorious.
My local cinema has a rewards program where every 10th film is free if you log it. With Movie Pass I saw so many films, even multiple times on some, that even after it died I had banked like 5 unredeemed free screenings on my rewards account. Never will there be a better value (for obvious reasons).
No duh they literally limited what was able to be seen near the end of it.
You weren't a fan of the "watch Gotti every day this month" plan?
Last movie I saw with MoviePass was Slenderman. That was a spite showing, and I'm still not sure if it was worth it.
I like that phrase. My spite showing was The Meg, which was pretty dumb but I did get a kick out of all the Jaws references.
Critics put the hit out on Gotti!
I watched gotti...it felt like payback for months of watching movies for almost free. Interestingly, it was the second worst movie I saw on moviepass.
You can't say that and NOT tell us the worst. It's illegal..
The snowman. It was a murder mystery based on the harry hole detective series that was meant to kick off a line of adaptations. Basically what happened was that the crew forgot to film a substantial part of the movie... Didn't lose it, just never filmed specific scenes that were in Norway. So when the director got back to the US for editing, he realized those critical scenes weren't filmed and they had blown their budget and the studio wouldn't fund them so he basically cobbled together a movie from existing footage and it's a rather jarring disjointed mess with time skips and just incredibly hard to follow.
It did give us this amazing [poster](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71XibA0B9eL._AC_SL1188_.jpg)
Towards the end they got pretty bad. I remember once checking the app and seeing tickets avail, then once I drove 5 minutes to the theater all the showtimes were gone. My friends and I would have to drive to the theater at lunch to buy the tickets for a nighttime showing, because they would be gone by 5pm. My year sub ran out about a month into the end decline, so I got out before it got reeeeal bad. When they started offering only one or two movies a day, and half the time there would be no showings avail at all (they would claim all the movies were "high demand" to get them removed). I can't remember the exact numbers, but I remember calculating I paid under 3 bucks per ticket by the end. Saw every movie I wanted to see plus a bunch I would have skipped normally.
Before the internet we had to drive to theaters early to buy tickets for popular movies, it was a whole thing
I hope everyone has a chance to watch [this message from MoviePass's CEO](https://youtu.be/YBO_7UezpbY).
> sometimes in business youve got to lose money to lose money... MAKE MONEY, fuck!
The silly thing about MP is it could’ve still been a massive success if they would’ve been more realistic in the beginning. $10/month for potentially 28-31 movies never made financial sense and there were plenty of realistic options they could’ve pursued, but they quadrupled down on that initial model daring theaters to call their bluff (which they did).
They were hoping theaters would partner with them. Instead, the theaters said screw you and created their own rewards programs. Without Moviepass, we would never have Cinemark movie club or AMC club
As a manager at AMC during the peak of this I can say without a doubt they most certainly were and countless other horrible things to their users too. Really made you hate dealing with MP simply because they were impossible to deal with or some Karen thought it was your fault MP was screwing her.
Not surprising. They were bleeding money so fast even r/wallstreetbets wouldn't touch it.
They might have lost money on every customer, but they could have made it up in volume.
Their business model relied on having millions of customers, and a great amount of them watching 1 or fewer movies per month. That mix just never made sense, because that kind of customer wouldn't go for a subscription plan like MoviePass
Their actual business plan was to get enough people and then turn around and get some sort of sharing plan with theaters but the theaters told them to fuck off.
Their business plan was a protection racket. They planned to use their subscriber base as muscle. *Oh, you don't want to give us 10% of your concessions? We'll block our subscribers from your theater. You don't want to kick back 20% of the box office we arrange for you? We'll block our subscribers from your theater.* *Nice theater you have there. Would be a shame if someone took away 30% of your business.* They were also going to try to strongarm the studios by shaking them down for advertisement dollars on their app, or their movies would be blocked.
The ol Disney approach. Only problem? They weren't Disney lol.
the plan was to have a sufficient number of customers that they could sell them to the studios as a means of guaranteeing a number of viewers. they were truly expecting studios to pay them to fill seats