I can’t imagine that they’re working with theaters because it works with an independent theater in my town too. Everything about the debit card approach seems to support doing this in a way theaters would have a hard time blocking, not working with theater cooperation.
And the theory someone else mentioned that the $9.99 price is to drive up subscribers so they can get bought makes sense to me as the kind of short sighted move that would “justify” burning through their funding.
There are an awful lot of different theaters on my app. I can’t imagine they worked some kind of deal with all of them. Furthermore I have no idea what that deal would be?
As a shallow observer, MoviePass is paying the price of the ticket for me. Which is hilariously expensive for them if I go hog wild. I only pay the monthly subscription which is less than a single ticket. LOL!
Yeah, if they’re bearing the full costs they will not last long at all.
Which seems just totally crazy! If this is for real long term (doubtful) I would cancel my Netflix and just watch all the movies on the big screen exclusively. (best way to watch)
It was the huge theater prices that made me switch to waiting for Netflix to begin with…
I definitely wouldn’t cancel Netflix - they’re way better for TV than they’ve ever been for movies (streaming, at least). But that’s me.
I’m not sure why they wouldn’t leverage the popularity of the service into deals with the movie theaters. It’s well known that movie theaters have to pass on almost 100% of tickets sales for new releases to the production companies, there’s almost no margin in it for them on the ticket sales today, even with ridiculously high pricing. All their money comes from food and special events.
If I’m paying $30+ for my wife and I to see a single movie you can be sure as hell I"m not going to pay $5 for a soda or anything else on top of that. But if I have movie pass and see two movies a month that’s $10 per movie I’m paying for both of us and I’m a lot more likely to buy concessions, especially since I’ve already paid for the moviepass on my credit card and not at the actual theater so it feels “free”.
So if they can make a deal with theaters that reduces the cost of the actual ticket by 50% to them that can go a long way making the endeavor possibly profitable (with secondary tiers of revenue based on the data at least).
I admit there may or may not be a secret sauce here but at this price point? I’ve seen two movies now (back to back days) and the room was no where near capacity…
The biggest thing is for me is being able to just watch movies on the big screen.
I’m not going to say that the Moviepass people have the secret sauce. I’m just saying I can see there being secret sauce if everything is being executed perfectly.
That being said as someone who is an owner of a business that’s seeking VC investment atm who has seen a lot of the fundraising mentality out there, I’d put more of a bet on it just being an attempt to gain data and users to raise more money, get acquired and have a good exit than them trying to build a sustainable and sound business.
The business model made sense, in terms of being profitable at scale, when it was $30 a month. It was just never likely to grow. At $10 a month, it’s very hard to see it being profitable in the long run.
If they don’t work alongside theaters and are really paying list price for every ticket there is no possible way for it to make money.
Well, ideally they’ll get people like me, who watch 3 movies a year in the theater, and usually go to the early morning Sunday show, since that’s my only day off, and I get good seats. So then I’d be spending $120 a year to get $15 of value out of the movie pass.
But that’s if my behavior wasn’t changed by the movie pass, of course.
Matinees here are $17, so you’d only have to watch 8 movies per year for them to lose money.
Like you, I probably watch <8 movies per year left to my druthers. But if I pay for the movie pass, my druthers would be… cruthers. I dunno where that was headed, I thought I had a bit going, but I lost it.
I just want to point out that a lot of information in WhollySchimdits earlier posts are out-dated…if anyone doesn’t already know and are wondering.
*You don’t have to take pictures of the ticket sub ever
*Viewing the movie is by date and not 24 hour period. I watched a movie at 9pm then watched another movie at 6pm the following day, then again at 2pm the next day. (I can’t help myself)
I think the process has been streamlined a lot. The only current restrictions I know of are:
You have to be near the theater to check-in by selecting the theater/movie/time
You have a 30 minute window to purchase the ticket from check-in time
That’s it.
The biggest annoyance is the app always logs you out and you need to manually sign-in frequently. There is like zero saved login info features whatsoever…but that isn’t really a deal breaker.
P.S. I’ve used it 5 times in 5 days without any issues.
I signed up August 16th and still haven’t received a debit card in the mail. Hmm.
I did revisit my original post with clarifications, including that they no longer ask me to photograph my tickets, but thanks for adding the part about it no longer being a 24 hour limit. I didn’t realize that!
24 hour limits are very unpleasant, because your eligibility window starts later every day. 18 hour limits make a lot more sense. Of course that assumes you want your customers to use your service daily.
Yeah, even in my original post this struck me as a weird restriction with no obvious motivation or benefit to Movie Pass. I can’t think of any way a subscriber could “exploit” the system that would have been addressed by the 24 hour restriction. Glad to hear it’s gone.
I guess I still need to see if watching the same movie twice is viable, but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be.
As an aside, getting a ticket to a movie downtown gives me parking validation…so I could exploit this for stress free parking downtown. (ignoring the movie of course)
If they’re not validating your purchases by ticket stub photos at all, then I imagine the trick I mentioned earlier still works. As long as you’re indicating in the app that you’re buying a ticket for a movie you haven’t seen yet, and the price is the same as whatever you actually purchase, they won’t know the difference.
The risk is that they may still randomly prompt for validation of the ticket stubs, so there’s a slim chance you might get “busted” for it. But I can’t find anything in their help section about this at all anymore. So maybe they have completely done away with it. I also remember reading specific rules about the verification of purchases that are apparently no longer on the site (or just better hidden now). It was something pretty strict, like if prompted to verify your ticket stub, you could only tell it you “lost” your ticket stub once, and anything after that might get your account suspended.
Yeah, I dunno about that. How would they prompt for validation exactly? How does that work? The app doesn’t seem to support it as is. So far it has just fed me movie tickets without complaint…once I have the ticket I don’t necessarily need to watch the movie for any reason and they would never know…