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

saw considerably fewer than you guys but I bought the full year subscription from
Costco and I’ve been enjoying the bundled Fandor subscription

even so, about 20 movies in, so it’s been more than worth the gamble

Stock is in a death spiral. Maybe they'll get bought out.

Twice this weekend I was in a theater where tickets were on sale for a dozen movies, but the Moviepass app showed only one or two

see above. service is totally frozen out, couldn't see anything with it last night and it remains down today. the moviepassclub subreddit is pretty obnoxious and blinkered as a rule but the big threads there should give some sense of the extent of the issues. at this point, only e-ticketing theaters are working and nothing guaranteed with those either. one of nyc's just vanished from the list in the last hour. countdown to shutdown.

i just snagged an e-ticket to see blindspotting tonight, woo! strong likelihood it is the last ticket i'm ever able to get through MP but i thought the same thing saturday so who knows.

this is going to make a great magazine feature

i think there's still a ghost of a chance that some other party buys the service for the sake of the user base and massively retools it. maybe regal or cinemark uses it to kickstart their own in-house thing. maybe some korean conglomerate determines a way that it works well in east asian markets. i feel like the only financially sustainable model (if way, way, less seductive to consumers) is more of a "coupon book" deal where you're paying a subscription in order to get a small number of cheapish tickets. this is basically how sinemia works, just no one has heard of them. that would still require a lot of legwork, and partnerships with theaters to bring down the cost to them of said tickets, and would never retain the massive user numbers moviepass had over the past year when it was just burning money giving people tickets.

the problem is that if AMC keeps their service in existence, and if regal rolls one out, that kind of satisfies the needs of the bulk of american moviegoers. a far lower-profile niche service catering to big-city movie buffs like yours truly, with a much higher monthly fee but helping you secure tickets at all the non-chain and small-chain options, might have an audience. a very small audience. that's what moviepass's subscriber base was for years. but it could be that scooping up moviepass is so cheap now that turning it into that is still a viable moneymaker. idk.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-30/nobody-pays-attention-to-fx-fees

MoviePass is a service where you pay them a monthly fee that is less than the price of a movie ticket, and in exchange they will buy you all the movie tickets you want, at full price, and make it up on volume somehow. For a while the market’s reaction to that business model was along the lines of “I don’t understand how that works but whatever the new economy is pretty interesting,” but then eventually the reaction shifted to “hahaha well that can’t work.” As public perception shifted, MoviePass’s parent company, the unpromisingly named Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., announced that its financial situation was fine because it had an “equity line of credit” that could cover its cash burn. An “equity line of credit” is a somewhat head-scratching notion, and it turned out that Helios and Matheson was just referring to a program where it could try to sell stock from time to time, and maybe someone would buy it.

This is conventionally called an “at-the-market offering,” and unlike a line of credit, it doesn’t really guarantee any funding. For instance, one problem with it is that the more stock you sell, the more you drive down your stock price, and the more stock you need to sell to raise the same amount of money. (Similarly, the worse your business gets, the more money you need, but the lower your stock price is.) Helios and Matheson’s stock is down about 98 percent for the month of July so far. It did a 1-for-250 reverse stock split on Wednesday so its stock price wouldn’t be too comically low. Its equity market capitalization, as of 10 a.m. today, was about $2.1 million. It is hard to raise millions of dollars selling stock when your market cap is $2.1 million. Also it’s in trouble with its payment processors, and “service went down Thursday after the processors stopped clearing payments for MoviePass.”

So it got a loan. For $6.2 million. The terms have a payday-loan severity:

"Investment firm Hudson Bay Capital Management can demand repayment of more than $3 million of the loan on Aug. 1, and the rest on Aug. 5. Proceeds from a planned stock sale must also be used to repay the debt.

"If Helios and Matheson Analytics fails to pay, it will be subject to a 15 percent annualized late fee until it makes good on the obligation. If the company is 48 hours late in its payment, Hudson Bay can require the company to repay the debt at 130 percent."

It’s a strange loan. (Here are Friday’s 8-K and the promissory note.) Hudson Bay paid Helios & Matheson $5 million for the $6.2 million note, meaning that even if it gets paid back on time—with no late fees or penalties—then the company is paying 24 percent interest to borrow money for like a week. Not 24 percent annualized; 24 percent for the week. Normal public companies do not pay that sort of rate to borrow $6.2 million for a week.

But you can see the logic. Helios & Matheson wants to sell stock, to pay for its operations and, now, to pay off that Hudson Bay note. (The proceeds of the at-the-money offering have to be applied first to pay off the note.) Once the payment processors shut off MoviePass and the business seizes up, there is really no more selling of stock. But if you can borrow money for just a little while, you can keep the business going and sell a bit more stock, and then … I dunno … maybe things will turn around?

I am not sure why anyone would buy the stock in that scenario, but then it’s not like anyone is. The stock is down about 80 percent since the loan was announced. The plan, as far as I can make it out, seems to have been to get a little money to stabilize things so that the company could sell more stock. It didn’t work.

Is there any way someone's using this as a way to do some halfassed money laundering or they're wheeling money out the back door?

There's no conceivable way it'd ever work as pitched and I kind of assumed there's a shell game going on that we're not privy to. Maybe there's a fake theater in their system and a bunch of false accounts that keep "seeing movies" there?

I mean people had assumed it was the user data that was valuable and not the movie ticket scheme. I never used Moviepass but I did trade hmny a lot last year. I've been out of it for some months though.

unless they figured out a way to magically harvest a lot more user data than it seems, there is absolutely no way they'd make any money. the amount of cash outflow, even if people did only see two movies a month on a $10/month plan, is ridiculous!

Xpost Spouse also traded it and quite frankly made a killing.

Meanwhile I’m just glad I could score an e ticket to eighth grade for tonight.

would either of you like to invest in my company? we sell magic beans

It depends, how many subscribers do you have to your magic bean menagerie?

The premise - after the big price drop last year - was essentially twofold:

1) acquire millions of subscribers and turn this fact into money somehow. The big hope was to be able to say to the major chains, look, we direct millions of people to your theaters, cut us in on the popcorn. Or: through targeted advertising and incentives within the service ("peak pricing") we can direct people to particular movies (appealing to distributors) or underpopulated showtimes (appealing to exhibitors), so please cut us in on cheap tickets and some of that sweet, sweet popcorn money. This didn't work for a number of reasons, most obviously that the theaters don't need help getting people to go see hit movies, and for non-hit movies, the MoviePass users are coming anyway because the ticket is effectively free to them. Something similar applied to hopes that their data would be useful in and of itself; probably they imagined they could be a Netflix Algorithm of Movies, and find a buyer for "people who watched Atomic Blonde were more likely to see Red Sparrow, especially after we pushed an ad for it to their phones," or something. But it's not clear how useful such data would ever be, particularly when everyone knows this is data for the subset of people who are paying $9.99 a month and can see literally any movie they want, and common sense already suggests that people who watched a bunch of superhero movies were statistically likely to go watch more of them. Even if that was worth something, it would never be worth enough to offset paying full retail price for every ticket.

2) at the same time, gradually reduce the bleed (while maintaining that tempting subscriber base) by introducing changes to the service that aren't severe enough to drive everybody you've hooked, but still make it better than buying dozens of full-price tickets (potentially) for a single $9.99 fee. They did implement some of these changes, and some of them were reasonable (if buggy) particularly requiring photographic ticket verificiation and limiting you to seeing a given movie only once. Both of those limited scalping of MP tickets, and Marvel zombie repeat viewing. Frankly, they should have implemented them right along with the price drop, instead of suffering months and months of "I saw Justice League four times on MoviePass!" They'd still have been losing money hand over fist for a year, but not as badly. Other features, like the "peak pricing" system, came too little, too late, and the laughable rollout (and sad attempt to make it look like an algorithmic "peak" rather than just charging you arbitrarily for whatever movies they felt like) made them look desperate. Hell, they could have done the price drop with an overhaul to "see one movie a week" and still gotten huge subscriber numbers - and probably way more 'gym membership' effect as people's weeks get busy and they let that particular week go by with no movie.

So basically, as written, the $9.99 version of MoviePass was almost always doomed, but its creators whipped up a vague cloud of potential that sounded interesting enough for some "disruption" minded investors to throw a fortune at it and watch it turn out to fail. In the meantime the masterminds got paid - that's the real scandal, if you're looking for one! I prefer to see it as a year-long period in which an app intended for world domination of the movie business instead served to transfer a whole lot of cash from sucker venture capitalists to theaters, and at least some of those theaters were scrappy repertory and art-house operations. Not the worst thing ever to come from Silicon Valley.

quincie, right on, it's a good film! be sure and screenshot the e-ticket QR code (or write it down if it's an alphanumeric code) in case the app is taken down today or something.

Good point, I will do that now!

oh ---- and a lot of ppl talked about it being like a gym membership, where you end up not going as much as you imagine, but the differences between the two things are so numerous that if nothing else the MP saga should become a parable for false analogies to gym memberships.

it was basically
1. offer an insanely good deal
2. build a gigantic user base
3. ???
4. profit

they pitched a lot of ideas for #3 but they were all insanely dumb

the one that movie companies actually paid for was promotion, but that premise -- which still didn't work -- was basically to put the squeeze on theaters by making it look like some films were getting more traffic than they would in a moviepass-less world, so maybe the theater holds on to your crappy movie for another week, or hoping that people go to movies based on box office receipts instead of reviews or word of mouth

it's basically the scam where books get on the bestseller list because the writer or the publisher went out and bought a shitload of copies of their own book

Most of silicon valley is a bro swindle.

the fact that one of the movies that paid for promotion was the Travolta John Gotti biopic that got abysmal reviews is a pretty good indicator of the viability of that scheme

I am trying to sit on my hands and not be tempted to buy some shares on speculation that they might be saved.

Yerac, EXACTLY

STOP BUYING INTO THE BRO SWINDLE STOCK

like every time you trade stock for a company that went public with no real profit model, all you're doing is jacking up rents in San Francisco and fucking people over

I was curious if the company started by someone I knew in high school went public and breathed a sigh of relief when I checked and determined it hasn't. I ran into him in town probably six years ago, when they'd been live a year or two, and he seemed completely uninterested in cashing out. Just wanted to build something that would actually be able to float on its own. Not saying he won't jump on that gravy train, but... man is he an outlier at this point

if we all pooled what we each spent on coffee and ice cream cones in a single day, ilx could become the majority shareholder

I guess it's maybe more ethical to buy stock in MoviePass's parent company than a guaranteed stable company like Raytheon or some shit, but bleh

I made a lot of money on it last year. It redbox and netflix ties. But it was also extremely low float when I was trading it.

I find the idea of "ethical" companies hilarious. Like if you sign up with Wealthsimple and see who they consider "ethical" (there's an option you can select to restrict you to stocks/funds designated as such) and then you drill down on what the funds are made up of, there's Amazon and Bank of America, etc. There are certainly degrees of evil, certainly, but by their very nature a company cannot prize ethics over profit.

brb moving my retirement fund into 100% bonds out of disgust

I don't know if there can truly be an ethical company. By virtue of going public, you have huge financial companies as bookrunners and you are serving investors first (over employees, clients).

a company can be ethical, a corporation almost certainly cannot

My employer was bought by a corporation several years before I started here, and even after a long time, the difference in employee viewpoints is a contrast from similar companies, partly due to the number of long-term coworkers who were here back in the 90s when it was still a private business. We were able to escape a lot of corporate shenanigans for a long time because some canny people in upper management were able to show it was more efficient and actually cheaper to do a lot of things in-house instead of outsourcing or contracting.

walked into the shutdown at 21:30 on Thursday night when I was trying to catch Blindspotting at an AMC multiplex on the way home from a 1930s screwball at the art museum. It was tagged as surge pricing, with a $6 fee, but wouldn't process that charge.

got in OK for the same 21:45 session on Friday night.

Saturday morning: evening screenings of lots of things were at surge, Mission Impossible was all greyed out. Planned for a 14:50 Eighth Grade at a Regal multiplex, left the house at 14:45, went to log in at 15:01 as I approached the theatre, and it had gone up to surge pricing after the official start time.

Sunday morning: surge pricing on most sessions all day, the 11:20 Eighth Grade was spared. Got in.


Today:

The Regal is IRL screening Eighth Grade, Equalizer 2, Hotel Transylvania 3, Incredibles 2, Jurassic Park 5, Mission Impossible 6, Mission Impossible 6 In 3D, Sicario 2, Ocean's 8, Identical Strangers Three, Skyscraper, and Won't You Be My Neighbour?
All Mission Impossible screenings are greyed out. I can't see if sessions are unsurged on Eighth or 8, because I've seen them already. Sicario only has one screening scheduled, at 21:25, and it is unsurged. The other seven films are not showing at all.

The AMC is IRL screening Ant-Man & The Wasp, Blindspotting, Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings, Hereditary, Jurassic Park 5, Mamma Mia! 2, MI:6, MI:6 3D, Skyscraper, Sorry To Bother You, Teen Titans GO! To The Movies, and Unfriended: Dark Web.
All Mission Impossible screenings are greyed out, as is Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings. I can't see if sessions are unsurged on Blindspotting or Hereditary, because I've seen them already. Unfriended has two sessions scheduled, neither are surged. The other seven films are not showing at all.

The nearby arthouse disappeared off Moviepass altogether two weeks ago.

The revival house has their 7pm Honey I Shrunk The Kids available, their 9pm Aliens is not showing up.

An indie to the south had every session on surge on the weekend; today their screenings of Three Identical Strangers and Sorry To Bother You are available, but Ant-Wasp and Mamma Mia are not showing up.

An indie-chain to the north yesterday had Mission Impossible and The Incredible greyed out, and The Catcher Was A Spy available. Today, MI is greyed out, Incredibles is available, and the Paul Rudd spy movie is not showing on the app.

forgot to add: Saturday's surge pricing had gone up to $8. still half of a full-price ticket.

Moviepass sent me a surveymonkey this morning about whether I would have seen Blindspotting without moviepass, whether the trailer on the app influenced me, if my movie companions included a non-subscriber etc, so they're still looking to leverage the data ongoing

App was ass today, started working miraculously around 9 PM. I went to go see a 35mm screening of Clint Eastwood's THE GAUNTLET. Good times.

Moviepass sent me a surveymonkey this morning

We are from the future and it is for toddlers

their new pitch to investors: "we're going to lose money slightly less quickly" : https://www.reddit.com/r/MoviePassClub/comments/93ekqe/official_press_release_moviepass_accelerates_plan/

but, amazingly, shit seems to be fully functional today, depending what movie you actually wanna see

short version of plan:

1. raise price to $15/month, keep on with surge pricing
2. morph into IndiePass by restricting access / focus on cutting deals with small theaters and distribs since obviously amc/regal are never gonna happen
3. something something data
4. ???
5. profit!

i am totally okay with this if it keeps the lights on. by far the biggest benefit to me is unfettered access to all the little art house and repertory options in nyc. they'll shed blockbuster nuts by the truckload but those are probably their most useless users for the long shot (imo doomed) plan of making themselves valuable in a "we can boost attendance and word of mouth for your $15 million film" niche.

I might get this for the two months I am in NY. But at the same time, it's such a chore to deal with movie theaters there.

how so?

I love running into Doc Casino at the movies, but I am not gonna carry a phone just for this precarious thing. I see enough films w/out it anyway.

If a movie is popular at all you need to get there at least 30 minutes ahead of time to get a decent seat. The closest movie theater to me is I think AMC about a 20 minute walk away, otherwise dealing with the subway just to see a movie is not my thing. Also, I might be slightly traumatized from seeing roaches on the wall of one in midtown and then a year later seeing that they had bedbugs.

Oh, although I used to love going to the Momi for movies when I was a member.

Idk about NYC but an increasing number of screening types at chain theaters in Canada have reserved seating options - not sure if those work w/ Moviepass though

yeah, the packed house thing is a real thing. honestly one of the best features of alamo and metrograph is that really only the very front row is too close to take in a pinch, and MG has the balcony for their bigger screen. (both also have reserved seats if you buy online, tho that's not an option with moviepass since they're not e-ticket partners). the quad OTOH has like 25% inhabitable seats per screen and the rake of the floor is so shallow that someone sitting down two rows in front of you can block the picture. their programming is fantastic though. virtually every seat in the angelika is, i believe, actually inside of a rumbling subway car. but overall morbs is correct, the main redeeming feature of nyc's theaters is discovering at the end of the movie that you've been sitting next to an awkward ilxor on a date.

also, totally off the moviepass radar, no reserved seating, but absolutely essential: film forum and spectacle.

my office temporarily moved really close to the film forum and i've been bummed they've been closed all summer

but i guess that ends tomorrow!

Going by yourself is easier, but yeah once you have people with you it becomes a whole stressful thing of getting there way too early to find seats together and the awkwardness of people saving way too many seats with jackets/bags.

yeah that's fair!