It seems that MoviePass actually did offer some movies on their app over Thanksgiving weekend, after all. In fact, for the first time since the unlimited days of August, my wife and I were both able to go to a movie theater, check in to movies on our apps, buy our tickets with our cards, and go see the movie together...ALL ON THE SAME VISIT.
It's a Thanksgiving miracle! MoviePass working AND offering something other than Indivisible!
I mean, full disclosure: we went to a 10:45am show and got there at 10:15am right when the theater opened to make sure we got our tickets before they shut the app down for the day.
Still counts.
After The Legendary MoviePass Two Weeks of One Nation, Indivisible, With No Liberty or Justice For All...there may be cinematic light at the end of the tunnel.
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And so on a lighter note, this is just kinda hilarious.
I didn't receive this new email promotion, but many folks I know did. MoviePass is joining forces with Winc Wines to offer $30 off plus free shipping on your next order from Winc Wines.
I mean, it's way too easy to make jokes about Winc and MoviePass finding synergy in their efforts to get people so drunk on one company's wine that they forget their account with the other company is mostly useless. Or to say MoviePass wants you drunk all the time so you'll stay home rather than try to go out to the movies. So let's not do those.
It never fails to blow my mind out the front of my face when I see brands still willing to partner with MoviePass. I mean...these companies have seen the Internet, right? Or even had experiences IRL? Because online or IRL, your brand is irreparably tainted when you team up with a company that generates so much ill will from their customers.
Here, let me offer some assistance to Winc Wines. I will come up with an ad slogan they can use at no charge. Free, I promise. Use it, Winc, I won't sue! Here you go:
Winc Wines: The MoviePass of Wines.
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And while we're on tangents this week, have you heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk? (Yes, yes, I promise we'll eventually get to the mega-scandalous MoviePass stories this week about no one using their accounts and the company finally legitimately getting sued in a class action lawsuit by their disgruntled customers. Be patient!)
Basically, it's Amazon's lowest-common-denominator crowdsourced online workforce. Anyone worldwide can join and get paid pennies a minute for endless hours of online work of all sorts. It's how cheapskate (and not-so-cheapskate) companies begrudgingly farm out online work they can't get robots to perform. Yet. (You heard about Amazon warehouse jobs? Well, these are the online equivalent of those.)
I told you that to tell you this: I always wondered how MoviePass handled ticket verification back when that was a thing. Did they really look at every single ticket every single one of their millions of members submitted through the app?
Yes.
And I just randomly found a reddit page for the Amazon turk (Mturk) employees who evaluated these tickets!
It's basically a failblog where these (massively underpaid, presumably disgruntled) Mturk workers submitted pics of the sloppiest ticket verification submissions. It's hilarious on that level, but also fascinating to see what the screen looks like when they evaluate these tickets.
It's 2018. You don't have to wonder about anything anymore. You can find out how the sausage is made, every step of the way!
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I have a coworker who casually mentioned she never uses her MoviePass anymore. She's not alone.
But at the same time, she mentioned that she calculated how many tickets she got with her annual plan back in the unlimited days and decided it already paid for itself, so she's content to let her year run out without making a big deal of it. She's being rational and reasonable about her MoviePass account. Unlike a certain writer...
...of this blog.
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And yeah, yeah, the big news this week is the class action lawsuit against MoviePass is officially for real, for realz.
I'm sympathetic. MoviePass yanked the rug out from below a whole lot of us back in August and they weren't tactful about it. It was needlessly sloppy and mean.
Why can't we all be more like my coworker, who's not angry unlimited is over, but just glad it happened?
Why can't MoviePass and the rest of us just get along?
[checks the MoviePass app]
"GAH! 12:30pm and they ALREADY got 'THERE ARE NO MORE SCREENINGS AT THIS THEATER TODAY' up for every theater! They said I'd be able to check in to Green Book today, those lousy bait-and-switchers! I can't get to the box office the MINUTE they open EVERY time, give me a break! How do I join in on this lawsuit, I'M SUING!!!"
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
I wrote the book on MoviePass TWICE, once from a positive perspective, and once from a more realistic perspective. I also wrote a horror book about a sort-of evil MoviePass.
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