Movie Pass Is Back

[Lyle Romer]

Umm, if you're selling tickets at a reduced rate then you're also making less profit on those tickets.

All this debate is putting the cart before the horse anyway. No terms between MP and its "partner" theaters have been announced, have they? They've got to do SOMETHING different than they did before, because the deal they had then was unsustainable. There's NO WAY they can just unilaterally reduce the price charged without somebody, somewhere having to pick up the slack. You know MoviePass isn't going to want to operate at a loss this time.

We're only one screen here so there's no reason for us to ever embrace it -- but I remain a skeptic. After all that's happened, it's probable that anybody who gets into bed with MoviePass runs the risk of losing their nightshirt.

A subscription service would make no sense at all for singles. The whole idea behind the value is being able to see multiple shows per week or at least something different weekly. For a single that has the same title for 2 or 3 weeks there's no value for the customer. For a lot of movies you could probably offer to let people see it again for free the next week and they wouldn't bother. Very few movies ever made are good enough to view twice within two weeks.

[Mike Blakesley]

Right, that's why we never signed-on to MP in the first place. Although, there are times during the year when we run a different show every week, or occasionally we'll have two shows in a week, but even when that happens, the movies don't always appeal to the same audience.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Right, that's why we never signed-on to MP in the first place. Although, there are times during the year when we run a different show every week, or occasionally we'll have two shows in a week, but even when that happens, the movies don't always appeal to the same audience.

Wasn't the first MoviePass more or less a transparent deal, as in, they signed you up, even if you didn't ask for it and then the customer paid with this pre-authorized MasterCard of theirs? You essentially didn't have anything to do with MoviePass.

[Martin McCaffery]

Yup, as far as we were concerned, it was just another credit card. I'm not sure they survived long enough to make it to the Sign Up or get ghosted phase.

[Mike Blakesley]

as far as we were concerned, it was just another credit card

Didn't the individual theater have to sign up to accept MP though? Otherwise how would the theater know that a seat was sold to MP?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Didn't the individual theater have to sign up to accept MP though? Otherwise how would the theater know that a seat was sold to MP?

For you as a theater, it was just another ticket sale at the box office, paid by credit card. You also just reported it like any other ticket sale. If you really wanted, you could probably get this data from the statements of your payment processor and AFAIK MoviePass also offered a login for theaters that more or less actively participated.

I don't know how they populated their initial database of "participating cinemas" and how they maintained their showtime data, but I guess they only automatically signed up those theaters which allowed threm to somehow scrape their showtimes from their website, because that information was crucial to the inner workings of their app and credit card payment system.

[Harold Hallikainen]

https://slate.com/business/2022/08/m...is-to-say.html

MoviePass Will Work This Time*

*If by “work” you mean “won’t instantaneously blowtorch tens of millions of dollars’ of wealthy people’s money.”

BY ALEX KIRSHNER
AUG 30, 20228:00 AM

MoviePass flamed out spectacularly the last time anyone had anything to say about it, but it was a marvelous trip into the sun. The company was founded in 2011, but it was in 2018 that a new ownership group came up with a business plan that basically amounted to lighting money on fire and allowing us, the moviegoers of America, to watch several (or many) films per month on the dime of the parent company’s investors. Specifically, MoviePass charged a little bit less than $10 per month and, with only a few nonintrusive exclusions, bought us tickets to see however many movies we wanted in theaters. Movie tickets cost right around $10, and MoviePass reportedly paid the full freight for each ticket. So, any MoviePass subscriber who went to more than one movie a month was bleeding the company dry. It was awesome, and MoviePass’ parent lost a quarter of a billion dollars in the first three quarters of 2018 before the money people decided that their largesse had reached its limit. Nothing good ever lasts.

By all rights, that is where the MoviePass story should have ended. Some investors who probably live in Connecticut or the Bay Area spent a few months subsidizing our collective film-inhaling habit, and then they realized this was a problem and started imposing user limitations and pulling shenanigans, and then the company went bankrupt in 2020. The end! But it wasn’t, because MoviePass’ original founder, Stacy Spikes—who was not the guy who decided to buy us all those tickets—bought his company back in 2021 and began plotting a relaunch. MP-Day is now approaching, and MoviePass will soon exist in yet another iteration. “We’ll let you know when you’re eligible to sign up!” the company is emailing potential customers.

I am more curious about MoviePass 2.0 (or maybe it’s 3.0; it’s hard to say) than I should be for a money incinerator that paid for me to see The Spy Who Dumped Me on the silver screen. But I had such a rollicking good time with MoviePass for a month or two that I cannot resist this comeback story. Can MoviePass succeed this time? I wouldn’t bet on it. The fundamentals don’t look that strong. Yet the people who drove MoviePass into a glorious crater are no longer in charge, and maybe Spikes can at least beat the existing bar by performing the relatively simple task of not losing $250 million in nine months while a nation of cinephiles squeals with glee.

For one thing, the business plan this time around looks a little bit more thought through than “charge people $10 a month for nearly unlimited movies and pray they don’t take you up on it.” The idea in MoviePass’ last go-around was that a movie subscription would function kind of like a gym membership, in that too many people wouldn’t use it all at once to make the entire thing unsustainable. Whoops! Meanwhile, the theory went, MoviePass would cultivate a big, loyal user base that it could eventually use to extract goodies from theaters, like discounted tickets or a cut of concession profits. I do not know if that ever could’ve worked, but we never got to find out, because, well … [gestures at the roughly quarter-billion-dollar losses]. MoviePass was far from the only company of this era to intentionally take huge losses in the hopes of making something out of them later on. It was, if anything, a little bit too wrapped up in a theory of business that has also defined far more successful companies—even those that have toiled for years to just now scratch the surface of making a profit.

This time, Spikes says, MoviePass has prenegotiated ticket deals with theater chains, though it sounds from this NPR interview like mega-chains AMC, Regal, and Cinemark are not included. Spikes also says there will be varying subscription prices from $10 to $20 to $30 per month, and they’ll involve a credit system that makes it pricier to go to popular movies at peak times. That should depress demand somewhat and may even spare MoviePass from hemorrhaging cash in the same manner it did last time. It will also make the product less appealing, and that’s a problem. It’s hard to offer a better perk package than the “buy one movie ticket, get a handful in return” approach of the old days.

In addition to the less obviously ridiculous business plan, MoviePass has a lot of name recognition, an email list of what should be several million possible return customers, and presumably some sense of who the people behind those email addresses are: where they’ve gone to movies before (in 2018), what kind of movies they liked (in 2018), how often they went to the movies (in 2018), and maybe more. Spikes can’t wave a magic wand and make MoviePass a good business with any of that, but profitable businesses have started with less. Sure, MoviePass burned some goodwill when it attempted to uncancel a bunch of accounts and block users from using the service the way it was advertised. But I think I still remember it fondly? Maybe it’s because I canceled a month or two ahead of time in fear of being collateral in the wreck.

None of this is practical for the moment, but I could envision a world in which MoviePass has a nonterrible few years, raises some more money, and becomes a public company on its own. (Its one-time acquirer, Helios and Matheson, was public before its management of MoviePass preceded it no longer being a company at all.) In that world, is MoviePass well-liked enough to cash in on the market’s continual memestocking? You can’t really plan for a bunch of Redditors to fall in love with your stock and drive it to the moon, and maybe there are some hard feelings between AMC’s APEs and MoviePass. But, hey. Sometimes water falls under the bridge, and some of us think MoviePass is at least a valiant public servant for having bought us so many good afternoons four years ago. Maybe MoviePass, too, can one day sell some stock into an internet-bred rally and use the funds to shore up its business for the long haul. (If nothing in this paragraph makes sense, then congratulations on understanding business as of two years ago. It was a calmer time.)



The new MoviePass is already going to be a pretty internetty sort of thing. It will be metaverse-ish, as Spikes recently told Inc. He said things like, “Customers, theaters, and studios will be able to trade in everything from commemorative NFTs to digital currency and more,” as well as, “These emerging technologies will allow us to build a full end-to-end cinematic marketplace that we have dreamed of for some time.” The burden is on MoviePass to explain to the rest of us how any of that will serve its goals as a movie subscription service or make our lives better as people who enjoy movies. I do not understand it, will not lie to you about understanding it, and am only 40 percent sure that MoviePass itself understands it.

I am also not sure if the next MoviePass is ideally suited to our times. Movie theaters weren’t pandemic winners. There are still a lot of theatergoers in this world, but the biggest chains (AMC among them) took cues from Old MoviePass and started their own subscription services. It’s a little easier to not bleed money on tickets when you are the ticketer, and so to whatever extent there’s an appetite for a movie subscription service, even a much smarter MoviePass might be a blackjack player going against the house.

... end deleted to meet character count limit

[Frank Cox]

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/2...launch-pricing

It’s official: MoviePass is back. Under the company’s new points-based system, you can pay $10 per month to watch one to three movies at any of the 4,000 participating theaters throughout the US.

In addition to the $10 / month Basic plan, MoviePass offers three more expensive subscription options: a $20 / month Standard plan for three to seven movies per month, a $30 / month Premium plan for five to 11 movies per month, and a $40 / month Pro for up to 30 movies per month. There’s a separate, more expensive subscription for customers in Southern California and the New York metro area.

The reason why each tier includes a range of movies you can watch has to do with the way MoviePass’ new credits system works. Every tier offers a different number of credits that you can redeem on movies each month, with Basic having the least number of credits and the Pro plan having the most.

4000 participating theatres?

Here's their list. It looks like they just listed every movie theatre in the USA.

https://www.moviepass.com/theaters

[Marcel Birgelen]

They literally just dumped every U.S. based theater they found on the list, but forgot to list the city names... apparently they're not aware that there are quite a few theaters with the exact same name in the same state*...

Also, their website is a pinnacle in non-descriptiveness... You pay them $10 a month or $20 a month if you live in Southern California or the NY Metro Area and for those 10 bucks you get 34 credits. But unless you sign up, there is no way to be found what those 34 credits will buy you, other than a general indicator of 1 to 3 movies, even their FAQ excels in vagueness:

How many credits does a movie cost?
The credit value of a movie is based on showtime, day of the week, and theater location. Since we’re still in BETA tests, we’re still undergoing price and plan testing so this will be subject to change.

The reason why the last iteration of MoviePass sold so well, at least initially, was because it was a to-good-to-be-true offer. Who is going to fork over $10, $20 or more for a service that guarantees absolutely nothing? I'd rather put that money in a slot machine, at least then I get to look a few seconds at a few spinning wheels or some flashy animations...

* Maybe it's part of their smokescreen strategy, where everything is vague and undefined, with the exception of what you're paying them every month. If you head to your local "Roxy Theater" they can still say... Ah, well, you went to THAT Roxy theater, sorry, that one isn't on the list, you went to the wrong one. Next time, pick one ON the list...

[Dennis Benjamin]

I signed up for Movie Pass this time "for research purposes". I chose the $20 a month tier. They charged me the $20 right away.

I never received my card. Additionally, I got an email saying "Your card is on the way" and then another "Your card should be in your mail box". But it never was there.

I attempted to contact someone at Moviepass. But they suffer from the same customer service issue most of these online companies have now - no way to get a hold of a live person. I emailed, I filled out a form, I searched online for a phone number - but no success. Out of fear that someone stole my Moviepass card, I canceled my subscription.

That ended that research project.

[Martin McCaffery]

Who is going to fork over $10, $20 or more for a service that guarantees absolutely nothing?

Well, the couple who use them at my theatre are young lawyers. They were also users of the original MoviePass. They come to almost every movie here, and I know they go to lots of movies at the multiplexes (though even they are getting tired of how awful it is seeing movies at this town's multiplexes). So I am pretty sure they are getting their money's worth. Also pretty sure these are the people MoviePass would like to get rid of.

[Darin Steffl]

I would embrace Moviepass because frequent visits usually mean frequent concessions.

I had original Moviepass and went to almost every movie out there because it was unlimited. I believe it was an annual purchase so I wanted to get my money's worth and I did. I frequently purchased concessions as well. So the theaters I visited using Moviepass made more money on concessions than if I didn't have it.

New Moviepass isn't unlimited because that's a money problem but it likely encourages people to visit cheaper theaters or go on value days because the ticket used fewer credits. So it's either go to one Friday night movie at AMC on the $10 plan or maybe 2-3 visits to our local theater for the same price.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Are they still planning on making money off user data? If theaters are being paid full price for tickets, are they counting on that "on average" subscriptions will cover ticket costs? Looking at other chain operated subscription or membership programs, how does a theater account to studios for admissions? If I buy a pass that gets me free admissions to a number of shows per month, does the studio get a percentage of the membership? Which studio?

[Frank Cox]

Since they (apparently) listed every movie theatre in the United States as "participating" they must intend to pay the full ticket price since I can't see most theatres offering a discount without even being asked.

Maybe the Moviepass card is some kind of a credit card?

I'm not in the US so it doesn't affect me, but I wonder what will happen if someone brings his Moviepass card into a theatre that doesn't take credit cards. The customer will probably be mad at the schnook selling the tickets if that theatre was listed as participating even though they may know nothing about it at all.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Maybe the Moviepass card is some kind of a credit card?

If the current MoviePass works like this is speculation, but I'm pretty sure it's the same system.

The original MoviePass worked like a credit card, coupled with pre-authorization via the MoviePass app on your phone. You selected a show in a theater near you and it would allow you to do a transaction for the amount of a single ticket via the credit card.

Apparently, the system often malfunctioned and some people were also able to buy concessions with the same card.

I guess it taps into the "gift card" system that credit card issues like MasterCard and VISA offer. This allows you to issue "no-name" credit cards that can be loaded up with a certain amount of funds. Those cards work like ordinary credit cards, but only with a "credit limit", limited by the amount loaded onto the card. MasterCard and VISA offer APIs for those. So I guess they "load" a card with a certain amount of dollars shortly before you arrive at the theater.

AFAIK, the previous MoviePass never supported on-line ticket purchases and isn't usable at theaters that don't accept credit card.