MoviePass - will it die a premature death or is it here to stay

The Costco deal came with a year of Fandor, too, so I guess my new problem is to remember to do things other than watching movies

lol i think last week was the first one that I didn't see a movie in months, was a weird feeling

I had meant to use the Costco promo. Turns out they are perfectly cool with you canceling and then going through the Costco promo instead, however, I have to wait for my account to activate first, which means receiving my card and starting the billing cycle first. But then once I cancel I can't use my primary email address for nine months until the account is totally closed. oh well, at least they are reasonably flexible.

man imagine being the moviepass intern stuck writing up little hollow, phony blurbs for stupid emails, hey movie buddy, we know your taste well and that's why we hope you're as excited as we are about MAZE RUNNER: DEATH CURE

this article on the AMC situation gives a much more hardball picture of the details: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-cuts-ties-with-amc-theaters-in-battle-for-revenue-share-2018-01-26

“I’m 1,000% ready to do battle,” Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of MoviePass’s majority owner Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc. HMNY, -3.92% told MarketWatch. “Hollywood is definitely paying attention to us, now we have to start pulling levers. We have to say to AMC, ‘look you don't want to deal with us, fine, but we’re not going to keep giving you free money’.’”

Farnsworth initially said he would cut ties with AMC, but MoviePass decided early Friday to pull just 10 of AMC’s more than 600 theaters instead.

MoviePass drove more than 1 million ticket sales to AMC theaters last month, compared with 10,000 sales last July, the month before it cut its monthly subscription to $10 from as much as $50, said Farnsworth. He also noted MoviePass represents roughly 62% of AMC’s operating income.

AMC was quick to rebuke the company after the price cut, saying the business model was unsustainable.

an interesting argument. "we came up with a scheme to transfer massive quantities of VC money from fleeced investors to theaters, promising that we'd eventually find a way to make it profitable. now here it is six months later and you theaters are flush with our VC cash transfers and what have we got to show for it?? about time you started paying your fair share of this deal!" if they are really driving new business to the theaters, which wouldn't surprise me (though them being 62% of AMC's operating income strikes me as completely absurd - wtf is that stat), then maybe it is time to start weaving this idea of fee-sharing into their business plan but it's going to be hard to do it without it looking like a shakedown each time. anyway obviously fee-sharing would only lower moviepass's losses; they still have to find some way of actually making money. could be the Maze Runner ads prove more viable.

the fee-sharing concept also looks kind of wonky from the theater perspective. by participating in moviepass you're making the moviepass subscription more attractive, since people jump on based on "you can use it at all these theaters!" if you're sharing fees with moviepass but another moviepass theater in town isn't, you're both getting the moviepass traffic (plus, hopefully, added popcorn sales etc.) but only one of you is having to share the wealth with moviepass. in a small way, you're subsidizing your competitors.

62%? that doesn't sound remotely plausible

moviepass has definitely gotten me to see movies I wouldn't have paid for, and probably spend more on snacks so maybe they have something there. still don't see that remotely paying off what i'm using from the card though

maybe Moviepass is a mob bustout for some poor schlub's gambling debts

Subscription services - movies, music, cable TV, phones - are a mental weight - I feel obliged to use them and “get my money’s worth.”

once you free yourself of that weight you will feel better imo

I pay them as penance for all I've downloaded.

i also have a tendency towards the get-the-money's-worth neurosis but it doesn't hit me as bad with netflix and moviepass because the price point is so low. together they add up to like, two cocktails with tip. if i watch even one thing on them a month that's a better use of my dollars than drinking (usually). and i use them a lot more than that. ymmv obv. i cannot imagine paying for cable tv though.

agreed, though i am the sucker that pays ~$200/month for cable because my parents can't live without Fox News.
so $10 a month for Amazon, Netflix and Moviepass each is a no-brainer

wow @ fox news... isn't that shit streaming on the web or something? buy them a cheap smart TV for $200 imho.

or just record fake Fox News broadcasts

idk in "goodbye lenin!" that proved to be more trouble than it was worth iirc

just record one week’s worth and play it back
in random order

they can use YouTube, but otherwise they'll never let of classic couch watching. at least they throw in some TCM in there every so often

buncha my FB friends are acting like they're woke for realizing the current model is unsustainable long term, like most people can't do the basic math in their head.

if anything the recent moves to make it work, especially the pushed notifications about maze runner 3, make it even more blindingly obvious that it's doomed. just gotta make it count while i can, i guess. see as many indelible classics on the big screen as you can, folks!

I bought in on the full year thing realizing it's going to be a chase against time to use the card at least a dozen times over a couple months

I'm ready

I've used it 12 times this month

Wired has a piece that gets into some of the implications of the model and what the future might hold.

https://www.wired.com/story/moviepass-second-act/

that's a much more interesting read than the 3700th iteration of "wake up sheeple! did you know $9.95 is LESS than the average price of a movie theatre ticket and that MoviePass is currently LOSING MONEY on every ticket?!!"

whether any of the lofty aspirations pan out obviously remains to be seen but kinda getting tired of smug friends IRL saying "oh you crafty cow, you knowwwwwww that is unsustainable, right dearie?"

tickets here are less but barely

but buying them every day sure isn’t doing em favors

cut forward two weeks, I have made good friends with the popcorn teen, and I now live off of popcorn and sleep in the broom closet at the movie theater

thank you, moviepass

here in town it's gotten so pricey that at some theatres $10 is the fuckin' matinee price!

yup that's true here in NY

heh I think my 2d Justice League ticket was $19 when I went to the Regal on 42nd street in Times Square.

new subscriptions (for the time being) capped to 4 movies a month w/ iHeartRadio bundled in.

existing subscriptions Terms and Services updated to prevent people from seeing same movie more than once (which was technically part of original agreement but MoviePass temporarily stopped enforcing it), and people will have to start scanning ticket stubs to prevent fraud.

I mean honestly, nothing shocking here, but of course the disinformation brigade is freaking out because either:

a) they were stupid enough to think the deal would last forever
b) they stupidly think their existing plan will be capped at 4-movies per month even though the Terms and Conditions still list the one 2d movie per month.

honestly I've made out like a bandit in just 4 months so when my annual subscription is up even if the unlimited never returns, I still won.

pretty much!

I’ve never been asked to scan a ticket stub but I keep going to a local indie place and a second theater that’s on their e-ticketing program so my fraud profile is probably super low

yeah with e-tickets they have a paper trail. I think some people actually managed to do the thing that I was curious about, which is somehow use the preloaded balance to buy a 3D or IMAX ticket, presumably by going to a pricier theatre, checking in so the balance loads, then going to a much cheaper theatre and using the preloaded balance to buy the fancier ticket.

I think the scanning thing is in beta with test subscribers?

I think the “beta” is they are making accounts with suspicious activity take pictures

lol I just got the email myself. haven't committed fraud but my usage is high so

Yeah I started having to scan my stubs a few weeks ago, it's a little annoying but not a big deal

one of the arguments today I heard - "7 new movies don't come out a week, so this is bullshit"

I use it a lot so of course I was on the beta for the ticket snap. I'm doing 5-10 movies a month, I've got no problem with it. Only get annoyed with I go to the theater and it doesn't work for whatever reason and I have to pay out of pocket, but that happens rarely enough.
I've even joined their competitor, Sinemia, which lets you get a limited number of tickets per month, like Moviepass of old, but allows for 3D and 1 specialty screening a month (IMAX, 4DX, etc.). they had a good promo earlier at $10 for 2 tickets per month, retail at 2 for $25 (which is fair if you're seeing 2 IMAX movies a month). Main reason is for double dip days when I can use Moviepass for the first movie and Sinemia for Movie #2.

imo some of the gripes are legit - the service was aggressively marketed as "see a movie every day!" and in most theater markets that's now impossible. if you signed up for an annual plan looking forward to seeing the tentpole blockbusters multiple times with different friends, the substance of the service has been changed out from under you, and in general i think we should always be pushing back against the legally and ethically shaky claims of "hey it was in the TOS that we could always change the TOS" whenever any of these companies leans on that. it just sounds like lame griping because moviepass remains a ridiculously good deal.

for me the bigger annoyance, hopefully soon to be fixed: the "Showtime Unavailable" option is treated as a single film titled Showtime Unavailable, so if you've ever used it, you can never use it again. just looks like bungled implementation to me but I could see it lazily not getting fixed for ages.

changing the TOS is totally dirty pool, agreed - hoping someone sues them on that one

on Showtime Unavailable, sounds like that's on purpose to get people to not use that option to see Avengers multiple times, again - dirty pool

Technically the TOS explictly stated that Moviepass “reserves the right to change from time to time the number of eligible movies a member can see per month.”, though not being a lawyer, I don't know if that's airtight, or about as legally shaky as "<business> is not responsible for any damages to your vehicle if you park in our lot"

but can they change the TOS for an agreement you paid for a year in advance? if it's month-to-month i can see the loophole working, but long term it should be like a lease

the little I know suggests that such clauses almost never hold up in court, but you have to take them to court, which few are going to bother to do for a service where the annual membership was under a hundred bucks and pays for itself after 5-10 movies. so it's the kind of totally slimy lame-ass move that companies always get away with.

xpost IDK - to be honest I barely know what was in my TOS when I signed up. For years, the policy was that you could only see each movie once, and then last Fall they finally changed it (hence why a lot of users erroneously thought for a while that they weren't allowed to).

but clearly the TOS in place when I signed up didn't have such a clause in it, otherwise I wouldn't have seen the updated terms yesterday. *shrug*. I'm not even clear if the TOS in place expressly guaranteed you could watch each movie unlimited times or if it merely didn't have language forbidding it anymore.

I didn't care much as repeat viewings weren't what I typically used it for, as most movies I see repeat times I'm usually seeing in premium formats cos I'm a spoiled individual.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-08/moviepass-owner-s-cash-runs-low-as-9-95-monthly-deal-takes-toll

Helios & Matheson said in a filing Tuesday that it had just $15.5 million in cash at the end of April, and the firm has been going through about $21.7 million a month. It also has $27.9 million on deposit with merchant processors.

get it before it's gone!

lol

Can't believe I'm actually rooting for some dim-witted venture capitalist to sink a zillion dollars into a failing tech company with little chance of ever being profitable, but I've seen seven or eight movies in the past two weeks with this thing and I don't want the ride to end

I had a conversation a few months ago with someone in the movie theater biz, and he basically said, "We have no idea how they think they're going to make money on this, but as long as they're paying us full price for the tickets we don't care."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-07/moviepass-was-not-a-good-business

The theory was that there were a lot of new marketplace businesses with strong network effects and winner-take-all dynamics, so it was crucial to get lots of customers quickly. If you could do that, you would lock in a leading position in the business, and your customers would come to rely on you. And then you could work out the unit economics — most obviously by raising prices, though you could think of other ways. Perhaps you would achieve some economies of scale when you got really big. Perhaps you could strike some sort of deal with your suppliers to lower your costs. In particular, there was a popular view that customer data was really valuable — “the new oil” — and that if you ended up with a lot of data about a lot of customers you could find some way to make money with it. Sell ads to other money-losing startups, maybe.

This theory sometimes went by the name “blitzscaling,” and it was part of the bull case for big-name startups like Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Inc. It was particularly associated with the venture investments of SoftBank Group Corp. and its Vision Fund. But the name that I often used for it around here — which I borrowed from Kevin Roose at the New York Times — was “the MoviePass economy.” Not because MoviePass was the first or biggest company to use this model, but because it was the funniest and most obvious example. When you take an Uber, you don’t really know whether Uber is making or losing money on the transaction. When you saw a movie with MoviePass, you knew.

I totally forget MoviePass even re-launched. Was that article a (second) obituary?

The article mentions (with this NPR link) that it’s coming back “but in a much less funny form.”

it's being rolled out in single cities as test markets and you get "credits" to spend on movies where the price varies depending on popularity, so i'm so it seems like they're actually trying to turn a profit this time

Yeah, I knew it was coming back; Chicago is one of the test markets, and I had an invite, though I had no interest in getting a membership. I just wasn't sure if all that had happened already and the service quickly died a second death.