MoviePass Is Back Up And Running, And This Time $10 Might Not Be Enough To Attract Customers

After whispers last summer that MoviePass would be relaunching, the company–which went bankrupt in 2020–is currently beta testing a modified subscription service for those film buffs missing their monthly movie tickets. 

Users once paid a $10 flat fee in order to watch any movie, at any theater, once a day, so long as the movie theater screening the film took credit cards as a form of payment and could charge a MoviePass debit card. This led to a greater accessibility to films and a boom in theater attendance: MoviePass was once responsible for buying 6% of all movie tickets sold in the U.S., and reported that with cheaper ticketing options available moviegoers spent more on concessions than they would have otherwise.

While seemingly lucrative, this model later became the achilles heel of the MoviePass subscription. Many users lost money, and along with it their trust in MoviePass. While users paid the $10 monthly flat fee, the company would purchase those discounted tickets in full directly from theaters each time users booked a film viewing. Confusion on the booking process and difficulty in covering ticket payments led to app crashes, calendar blackouts, and a complete inability to contact customer service to dispel confusion. After its acquisition MoviePass struggled to stay afloat, leading to its bankruptcy.

But in August of 2022 the organization posted to social media announcing the return of MoviePass with a new and improved subscription model, releasing a waitlist wherein prospective customers in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City would be the first to access the newly designed subscription service. Over the past months, the number of residents who were eligible for the beta launch expanded, including Tampa, New York and other cities. By December of 2022, membership cards for new and returning users began arriving in the mail. Those who signed up via the rapidly expanding waitlist could opt-in with the ability to cancel their subscription at any time and choose from one of three to four different pricing tiers–potentially ranging from the original $10 a month subscription mode to $40.

Instead of a flat fee allowing unlimited access to all movies and theaters that take card payment, with each level of monthly membership users will receive limited MoviePass credits on their card. “The credit value of a movie is based on showtime, day of the week, and theater location,” MoviePass notes on its website. “Waitlist users are testing different pricing plans in various cities. Plans and pricing will normalize when we open to the general public.” This month, waitlisters in Minneapolis-St. Paul are up next to join MoviePass, and they get to bring friends and family along for the ride.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla is one such user who signed up for the waitlist and gained access to the newest version of MoviePass just this past week. While many former subscribers are looking forward to reuniting with their MoviePass card, Zorrilla is excited to finally have a shot at seeing more movies for a discounted price. "It wasn't until the death of MoviePass that i wound up hearng about it," she tells CCW Digital. "It sucks that there were so many issues, all sorts of flailing at the company., But it was always at the back of my mind as something interesting to have if it was ever to come back." When she saw a peer share on Twitter that MoviePass was returning, Zorrilla went straight to the company's website to see how she could sign up for the service. Upon releazing that the Twin Cities area was elligible for the beta test, she submitted her email address to the waitlist.

Now that she's finally off it, she's estatic, but cautious. "I'm doing the first tier for about $10.99 which comes out about to 1-3 movies a month, which is still a significant discount," she notes. "We'll go from there." In addition to her own subcription, as a beta tester Zorrilla also has the opportunity to invite 10 other people in her geographical area to join the pilot program. "I'm not sure how the invites work," she explains, "it might expidite the waitlist process."

The “new” pricing options Zorrilla could chose from is actually a return to MoviePass’s original structure, according to co-founder and CEO Stacy Spikes. The $10 subscription fee only came into play when the organization, founded in 2011, was acquired by a private equity group in 2017. “Part of the acquisition was that they wanted to announce the merger by dropping the price of a MoviePass subscription to $10 a month for a period of time,” Spikes told BoxOfficePro. “When I was CEO, it was $30 a month,” he said. They wanted to add another 100,000 subscribers, thinking it would maybe take a couple of months.” However, that couple of months soon turned into years, making the $10 subscription model the standard to Spikes’ chagrin. “You cannot make money at $10 a month when you are allowing people to go to the movies every day,” he warned. “They said no, we got this—we know what we are doing.”

By 2020, MoviePass had 3 million users and Spikes had been kicked off the board of his own company. Despite this, he still saw redeeming qualities in the company he created. “Long story short, I went back and bought MoviePass out of bankruptcy,” he explained. With his backing, the service is treading lightly in terms of how it secures users and secures tickets. 

A lack of relationships with major movie theaters once caused a backlog for MoviePass, but Spikes notes that "even prior to launch, we've negotiated partnerships with more than 25% of all the theaters. If you take out AMC, Regal and Cinemark, we've got 40% market share outside of the big three.” While most moviegoers will patronize the aforementioned theaters, some of whom have their own subscription  services, “if you want the freedom to go wherever you want and find the same value, then you're going to want something like MoviePass,” he adds.

Considering that AMC recently announced its “Sightline” pricing that increases the cost of some theater seats, how the addition of MoviePass will further impact the theater going experience has yet to be seen. Zorrilla thinks that curiousity surrounding MoviePass's resurgence and its new tier structure could be one way to circumvent the price hike: "The recent news that AMC is going to have this weird tierd pricing for its seating is making me feel like soemthing like MoviePass can kind of bypass that mess."

While customers across entertainment are expressing a sort of subscription fatigue–paying for multiple streaming and viewing services with little opportunity to truly benefit from any one experience–coupled with inflation and a post-pandemic fall in ticket sales, MoviePass will just be solidifying the structure of its second iteration.

As the subscription service pushes forward with MoviePass’s CEO back at the helm, he has the pitfalls of the past, the challenges of today and the goals of the future in mind. “Customer service comes first,” he says. “On Christmas Day, I was in the chat rooms answering live customer service questions. It is part of our company culture, we have everybody spend time there to understand that that is the most important thing. That has always been the way that we operated.”

Photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash