Are you ready for MoviePass: The Movie?
The Day I Met El Chapo producer David Broome is currently in pre-production on a documentary charting the rise and meteoric fall of movie ticket subscription service MoviePass.
According to Deadline, who broke the story, Broome already has secured participation from former MoviePass Chairman Ted Farnsworth and former company CEO Mitch Lowe. Deadline reports that other talking heads in the film will include “exhibition execs from the likes of AMC, Regal and Cinemark, as well as studio execs, financiers and media.”
Founded in 2011, the company experimented with several types of pricing models, before hitting on it’s movie-movie-a-day for $10 per month price point that saw its subscriber numbers first start to climb. At its peak in June 2018, MoviePass boasted a subscriber base of some 3 million customers. Initially, the company hoped to be able to sell the data it was collecting about its users’ movie-going habits for possible use in demographic-targeted advertising. It also looked as if MoviePass was counting on usage similar to health clubs, where some subscribers use the service on a regular basis, but the bulk of customers might not from month to month while still paying their monthly fee.
The cracks in the company’s surface started to show the summer of 2018 when it was announced that it was expecting to run a deficit of $45 million for the month of June. The weekend of its premier, MoviePass blocked out the ability to purchase tickets for the Tom Cruise action film Mission: Impossible: Fallout. As the summer rolled into the fall, MoviePass continued to change its terms of service and the availability of certain movies as a way to stem the flow of red ink. Many pundits expected the company to fold by the end of the year as users quit the service. At the time of MoviePass’s shutdown in September 2019, it was estimated that their subscribers ranged in the low 100,000s.
Although MoviePass ultimately failed, it did pave the way for theater chains to launch their own similar in-house promotional programs such as AMC Theater’s Stubs program and Cinemark’s Movie Club.
