I cancelled yesterday, laughing out loud at their warning that I wouldn’t be able to resubscribe for nine months. In nine months no one will be able to subscribe.
Yeah there is no way Moviepass is profitable without a huge subscriber base that doesn’t actually use the service, but still pays monthly.
On the positive side, every person who cancels brings them closer to profitability!
Well, spotify & co still exist, so there is precedent there.
Spotify isn’t really a comparable service. They have a pool of money that they pay out to artists based on the amount and length of time that artist is listened to. But I believe it is a percentage of that pool, not an open ended amount. Whereas Moviepass literally just buys market price tickets on its users’ behalf.
Good luck with that
It’s surprisingly satisfying watching this all go down exactly as we all imagined a year ago.
That venture capital entertained a lot of people. Nothing of value was lost. (Unless you were an investor.)
Did US chains really not have proprietary subscription services before now? They’ve been a thing at many chains in the UK for at least a decade, and all the big chains have had them since 2016.
Obviously it’s not quite as convenient as being able to go to any cinema you like, but if you mainly go to your local cinema it’s not that much of a restriction.
Several have had discount programs and a few have had subscriptions. From what little I’ve gleamed, they haven’t been terribly successful. Redbox, Netflix, etc. paired with a rising prices vs. flat wages dilemma have really eaten away at their consumer base.
Yeah, I don’t think the UK ones are all that popular either. I’m just querying that article’s suggestion that Moviepass, while itself a failure, may still revolutionise the movie business as cinemas do their own subscriptions. As far as I can see, the only thing revolutionary about it is that they sold tickets at a loss.
Helios and Matheson (HMNY) successfully repaid the $6.2 million it owed for the short-term loan it recently took out to help keep MoviePass operational. It also increased MoviePass pricing and added restrictions on new movies to help reduce costs.
Helios and Matheson mentioned that its price increase and the new release restrictions should reduce its cash burn by 60%. However, with July’s cash burn previously estimated by the company at $45+ million, that would mean that Helios and Matheson would still be burning around $18 million per month after the reduction in cash burn.
With Helios and Matheson technically able to issue up to 5 billion shares (the reverse split did not affect the amount of authorised shares), it may be able to fund its cash burn for a little while longer assuming that buyers can be found.
At the current $0.15 per share price, it would need to add 120 million shares to fund one month worth of the reduced cash burn. This would dwarf the 1.7 million shares it had outstanding after its reverse split and the 6.7 million shares it had outstanding as of July 31. Given the massive rate of its share price decline though (down around 99% in just over a week), it seems likely that Helios and Matheson would need to add much more than 120 million shares just to cover one month of cash burn though.
Though as of now it’s 7 cents per share :P.
Yeah I killed my subscription too. It was a good run moviepass, but put a fork in it. You
are done.
Mostly because I drove not once but twice to a movie and moviepass said…sorry…No more viewings. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. You’re done.
P.S. I did experience the “Golden Age” of moviepass though so I don’t feel bad. That being any movie once per day without their restriction now.
I just learned the other day about Sinemia, which looks basically like Moviepass run by someone who actually understands pricing. Plans are 1-3 tickets per month and the pricing is around $5 per ticket, or family plans that pretty much double the tickets and prices. (Technically those prices are for a summer sale, but I’d bet summer sales are followed by back-to-school sales, Thanksgiving sales, holiday sales, etc.)
This might be a model that survives the inevitable Moviepass implosion. On the other hand, it might be wiped out by the theater chains doing their own things.
It’s very sad to see a company that basically helped wake the theaters up probably not last to see the end result.
This kind of reminds me of Red Lobsters and their all you can eat lobster mess and the assumptions they made about people and their want to self moderate.
I would never have the kind of time or want to spend all my free time to see a ton of movies in theater per month… maybe 1-2, stretch to three during a really good release month. Our tickets are less than 10 dollars most the time (non 3D), and I think even I would have cost them money.
At 8.99 a month for Cinemark, it’s hard for me to find a ticket that cost more than 8.99 if I don’t see an evening show on Friday or Saturday. The only reason I subscribe is it saves me 1.50 per ticket fee to reserve seats online. This means I order all the group movies and get paid back.
Yeah, I’ve got a really nice Cinemark nearby and I subscribe to that program as well. It saves me about 15 bucks on a pair of tickets. I’m hoping they don’t follow AMC to a higher cost, more movies program. I don’t see enough movies in the theater to justify it, and I don’t want to go back to paying the “convenience fees”. Why are you charging me a fee when you force online purchases because all of the seats are reserved? It’s Ticketmaster level crap and I hate it.
One of the summer jobs I had while finishing up college was to sell concert tickets for the county fair shows. It was through Tickmaster. What this meant is even if you drove up to the tiny wooden booth we sold these tickets at, in person, and you were handed a paper ticket, you still paid that fee… others would get so angry. All I did though was sign into the exact same website they could access at home, input their information and give them a ticket with their receipt.
I wanted to put a sign up that said folks you can do this from home and just pick up the ticket here instead of buy it. You’re not saving anything and we’re seasonal employees, so stop telling us how unfair it is.
3 tickets a month!
MoviePass subscribers pay $9.95 a month to see up to a movie a day. In practice 85% see three or fewer a month, and Mr. Lowe said his company is now focusing on those customers.
As of June, MoviePass’s monthly cash deficit was $45 million, parent company Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc. HMNY, +30.14% said in regulatory filings.