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

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."

I've seen 49 movies with it this year. It stopped working for two weeks recently due to app updates, I almost had to go and buy a reading lamp

would you prefer moviepass stay like it is or would you prefer if they just started giving you money?
so now you can have a burrito instead of watching blockers or whatever.

what if I go to half the movies, but they're at a theater that serves burritos and the ticket comes with a burrito

My favorite thing about MoviePass is that their on-the-record business model is "let's lose money while you laugh at us" and their off-the-record business model is clearly "let's sell our user locations and weekend travel routes to a bunch of guys in a parking garage."

— Kaleb Horton (@kalebhorton) May 8, 2018

would you prefer moviepass stay like it is or would you prefer if they just started giving you money?
so now you can have a burrito instead of watching blockers or whatever.

the last five films I've seen at moviepass cinemas were: Suspiria (1977), Salesman (1969), L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970), Some Like It Hot (1959), and All About Eve (1950). I'm happy to make a sandwich and keep seeing things like this on a big screen.

(but I also saw Blockers bcz I like 30 Rock and Ike Barinholtz in Eastbound & Down)

what's the burrito equivalent of suspiria?

What does the "some guys in a parking garage" part of that Kaleb Horton tweet mean?