MoviePass

» see moviepass.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

moviepass never came to turkey. it was a us-only product in the most literal sense, locked to a list of partner theaters in american cities and tied to a magstripe debit card that only worked at us point-of-sale terminals. i watched the whole arc unfold from outside the country as a slow public exercise in cash burn that would have been a comedy if it had not been a real company.

stacy spikes and hamet watt launched moviepass on june 30, 2011 as a sane subscription product. you paid somewhere between $30 and $50 a month depending on the city, you got a card that worked at most theaters, and the math of one or two movies a month worked out reasonably for both sides. it stayed small for six years. then in august 2017, helios and matheson analytics bought a majority stake and dropped the monthly price to $9.95 for unlimited tickets. that is below the cost of a single matinee ticket in los angeles, and well below the cost of any evening ticket in new york.

moviepass's user count went from about 20,000 to 3 million in less than a year. helios was paying full retail price to theaters for every ticket its subscribers used. the company burned through about $40 million a month at peak and tried to slow the bleed with hidden usage caps along with password resets that quietly kicked active users out. a later mandatory ticket-photo verification system asked subscribers to photograph their stub at the box office, and the ftc eventually sued over those tactics. the service shut down on september 14, 2019, and helios filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy on january 28, 2020.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the original moviepass under spikes and watt was an unremarkable mid-tier subscription. press coverage was light and the user base was tiny by entertainment standards. the inflection point was the august 2017 takeover and the price drop to $9.95. that price was loud enough to get into the mainstream news cycle, including the late-night talk-show monologue circuit. for the next year moviepass was a running joke about silicon valley's relationship with unit economics, where the joke was that everyone signed up and the company kept paying for it.

~ the slide ~

helios was funding the gap between the $9.95 monthly fee and the actual ticket cost out of stock issuances. the company was effectively printing shares to pay theaters. each new subscriber made the loss bigger because the average user went to more than one movie per month at that price. there was no path to break even at the unit level without a price hike or a deal that gave moviepass a discount on tickets, and the major theater chains refused to give one. amc said publicly that moviepass was unsustainable and launched its own subscription, amc stubs a-list, in june 2018.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part was that moviepass kept telling investors it had a data play. the pitch was that aggregate moviegoing data would be valuable enough to subsidize the ticket cost. nobody on the buy side ever really believed this. the actual data play would have required market share at a scale that the unit economics could not support. moviepass crashed because the cash ran out, not because the data was wrong. stacy spikes bought the company back from bankruptcy in november 2021 and relaunched it as a tiered $10 to $30 product, which is roughly the original 2011 model that he had built before helios and matheson dropped the price.

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