Moviepass and Lowered Standards

Just realized I never blogged about Moviepass.

Now I have. It's great. Join it. (I get no benefit for referring you, other than the warm, comforting knowledge that I shared a great thing with you.)

Real quick: You subscribe to the service for $9.95 a month and use it to see nearly-unlimited movies in the theater. The catch? They're tracking you and selling your data (the same way, you know, this other site does). Any questions? They're answered here.

So what's life like post-Moviepass? 

It's interesting.

I'm a movie buff. Seen pretty much every one ever made (especially if it's horror). But I always hated going to the movies. Too expensive, people talking & texting, can't get a good seat, hate the ads before the movie, you name a reason. Consequently, I only went to the movies once every month or two. I had to REALLY want to see something to get out of the house.

But since joining Moviepass three months ago, I average two theatrical movies per week.

(Since you asked: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, The Shape of Water, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Darkest Hour, Beyond Skyline, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, My Friend Dahmer, Lady Bird, Coco, Justice League, The Florida Project, Murder on the Orient Express, Loving Vincent, Thor: Ragnarok, Jigsaw, Geostorm, Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween, Death Becomes Her, Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle, Happy Death Day, American Made, Suspiria, Blade Runner 2049, My Little Pony: The Movie, mother!, Lego Ninjago Movie)

In a world without Moviepass: of those 27 movies, I would have seen... maybe... four of them theatrically.

That's a huge change in consumer behavior. And let's do some fun math. Three months of Moviepass cost me $30. For 27 movies. That means I paid... $1.11 per movie. This service effectively turned every movie theater in my town into a dollar theater.

It makes you a lot less discriminating. Like with the new Jumanji. In my head, I was murmuring, "There's nothing here. No subtext. Just a random series of events. One scene drags into the next, with an occasional lively or entertaining blip. They gave us just enough info to know who the teenage characters are to understand the one-note gag of them having a different physical appearance once they enter the game (Jack Black LOOKS like an overweight adult male, but he's ACTING LIKE a skinny teenage female! HAHAHAHA!), but not interested enough to follow their journey or feel invested in their safe return to our world, or the fate of the game world. This is more a scattershot video game satire than a Jumanji film. Would have been pretty clever in the mid-90s but now these jokes/ideas are pretty stale. Hey this is what the Super Mario Bros. movie should have done, that would have worked really well in 1994, or whenever it came out. Man, that movie was amazingly bad. But this movie is just okay-ily bad. The Rock is awesome. Look at that smoldering hunk. So funny, too! He's a shining light in this dark world. Jack Black is okay, I guess. Everyone's complaining in this movie or saying they don't want to play the game. How do the filmmakers think that makes us as audience members feel? Like if the characters don't want to experience this, why would we? And what's with the lame punchlines/non-endings on every scene? It's like they filmed the first draft. It needed a director. Or a writer to add some zing. [Credits roll] Four writers? And none of them could punch this limp slog up? At least they're leaving me with the G n' R song, 'Welcome to the Jungle.' Always loved that song. Wore out my brother's Appetite for Destruction cassette in 1987 rewinding and listening to that song over and over and over. Hey, that experience planted the seeds for my 1987-set book Heavy Metal Scientology Aliens! But it now!"

So it wasn't the best movie ever made. But whatever. It cost me next-to-nothing (plus my wife and friends liked it), so I shrugged, said the Serenity Prayer, accepted that I wasn't the target demo, and moved on with my life. No harm done, thanks to the magic of Moviepass.

But it changes not just the quality of the film, but also the filmgoing experience. Talkers or texters? Whatever. Bad seat? It was practically free! Ads before previews? I got this down to a science, so I always arrive 10-15 minutes late so I never see ads or previews anymore!

I don't even care about the glitches of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema movie-going experience anymore (which I've complained about before). When you're paying $1.11 per movie, you don't care about that petty stuff. You just think of the Alamo like you're watching a movie in a cozy seat in your living room and a friend keeps getting up and walking by you to get a snack or something.

So is this good or bad?

I don't know.

It took about a month of Moviepass for me to realize the only investment in big-screen entertainment is time. I would think, "Is Suburbicon worth the 10-15 minute drive to the theater, plus the 10-15 minute drive home?" If the answer was "No," the movie is no-go.

And heck, I enjoy going to the movies again. For many years, I saw every movie that came out because I worked at movie theaters. I have that same sense of fun now because I'm no longer thinking about how much I'm spending. In a world as latrine-rat-crazy as our current one, it's nice to have such a pleasant and cheap escapist outlet.

Executive summary: With Moviepass, the movie-going expense is negligible. All you have to invest is the time it plays and the round-trip commute. For better and for worse.

I'll take that deal.


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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