Yes, I know.
It’s a miracle MoviePass ever existed at
all.
I wrote an entire book expressing
gratitude and awe for this service.
But multiple times per day, I still meet
people who never understood how MoviePass worked.
“Why
did theaters let people see so many movies for such a low price?”
“How
did MoviePass convince theaters to only take $9.95 a month to let all their
customers in?”
“It
didn’t REALLY ever work, did it?”
Sigh.
Yes, it DID work. And it was perfect.
For a while.
*
To clarify what they did, because THIS WAS
A THING THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED:
MoviePass didn’t work directly with
theaters.
They simply used a stored-value red Mastercard
stamped with their logo that they sent to their users.
You checked in on the MoviePass app for
the movie and showtime you wanted. (According to the Terms of Use, you had to
be within 100 yards of the theater to do so, but I found it worked from as far
as 1.3 miles away for certain theaters.) And then your card was loaded with the
amount of money needed to buy that full-price ticket. And you bought the ticket
at the box office (or kiosk), same as you would with any credit card for any
ticket.
And you were good to go.
(MoviePass sometimes demanded a picture of
your ticket to prove you didn’t spend the money they just gave you on popcorn
or booze.)
This really existed.
MoviePass really offered the thing I just
described.
You could do it every stinking day.
Many of us did!
Buy a full-priced movie ticket and lose
yourself in cinematic bliss, over and over and over.
For $9.95/month.
THEY DID THIS.
That merits a moment’s consideration.
If you’re reading this and finally understanding what us MoviePass
users were actually doing that whole time you were Debbie Downer skeptically-scoffing
about how unsustainable it was, you’re probably still subvocally-muttering to yourself: “OKAY, FINE! IT WORKED! BUT
OF COURSE IT FELL APART!”
Yes, yes.
But it’s not that MoviePass fell apart, it’s how
it fall apart. Specifically how they
chose to make it fall apart. And how swiftly and irreversibly it went down
the tubes. Very unfortunate, as it made their advocates and mavens (such as
myself) look bad by association.
We’ll explore how and why this glorious
service imploded, step-by-step, in subsequent chapters.
*
To address the obvious, most common
inquiries:
Q:
“Why did they do this?”
A: To build up a huge user base.
Q:
“How did they do this?”
A: They had patient investors who weren’t
afraid of deficits.
Q:
“How can a company possibly operate on such a deep deficit?”
A: Ask Amazon. Or the U.S. government.
Capitalism is strange, kids.
Q:
“How did they expect to ever make money?”
A: By selling ads and user data and
partnering with theaters/other companies on promotions and collecting
subscription revenue from customers, who they hoped would only go once or zero
times to the movies each month. (Oopsie!)
Q: “Huh?
This is crazy, none of that makes sense!”
A: That wasn’t really a question, but yes.
Agreed.
*
Let’s talk user data for a moment, since
that’s a point that usually elicits an eyebrow-raise.
Yes, MoviePass gathered a TON of user
data, cutting a wide swath of data analytics.
But the analytics were useless, because
they were a distorted, inaccurate, skewed representation of customer behavior
and preferences. After getting MoviePass, NOBODY continued to go to the movies
the sparse way they always did before.
Data points telling you I saw Melissa
McCarthy’s Life of the Party…?
What exactly
does that tell you, MoviePass?
One thing: that if you make all movies
free, I will watch the ones I want to see, the ones I kind of want to see, and
then I will watch Life of the Party.
Because it’s BASICALLY FREE.
Big revelation: People will watch almost
anything if you make it free!
MoviePass would sometimes send quick
one-question surveys via email every now and then, such as “Would you have seen
Life of the Party without MoviePass?”
And I sometimes answered them, sometimes not.
And the only other “user data harvesting”
(other than tracking our location which they PROMISE they’re not doing unless
we have the app activated, haha right) was to ask for a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down on the movie we just saw.
And I thumbs-upped everything unless it
was unwatchable. I think even Life of the
Party got a thumbs-up. Because who cares, it was a movie, killed a couple
hot summer hours in a comfy theater with refreshing A/C. No biggie.
Brilliant data-gathering work there, MoviePass!
*
For goodness’ sakes, MoviePass never should have let us use the
unlimited plan as long as we did.
It’s simply too addictive.
It should have been made available as a promotional
offer for new users for two or three months, tops.
And we all would have kissed them on the
lips for it!
MoviePass gave us too good a thing for too
long and it spoiled us rotten and turned us all into ingrates and cinema
junkies.
It’s not all on us users, though.
MoviePass was awesome but they also had
terminally bad PR, uncommunicative customer service, endless comically awkward “mea
culpa” emails from the CEO, and an Instagram account that went completely off
the rails in April 2018, mocking competitors and using irreverent humor that
would eventually boomerang. (The comments section of MoviePass’ recent
Instagram posts makes for some of the best schadenfreude literature of all
time. The negative-to-positive comment ratio is about 500:1.)
But let’s take this back to the start.
Who on Earth thought any of this was a
good idea? Why? When? Where? What? How?
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
(I also wrote the authoritative literary work on MoviePass, Cinemadness: Live Your Best MoviePass Life)
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