Like a bandit. That's how I made out. I scored 30 movies for only $45. Can't complain. But I probably will!
*
When we last left off at the end of Cinemadness 4: Sinemia Scams and MoviePass Mania, I was just getting started with Uncapped and it was working shockingly well. I was able to go once in a while and actually check in and buy a ticket IN THE EVENING for the ACTUAL SHOWTIME of the ACTUAL MOVIE I WANTED TO SEE.
It had been many, many moons since I'd had that experience and it brought me much joy and there was much rejoicing.
But here's why it worked: because I was barely using it. Late April in the Year of Our Lord 2019 was a grim and dark and grimdark time for moviegoers hungry for movies to moviego to. Never had there been such a dire time to have an Uncapped MoviePass account. It was like having a perfect simile that describes a thing perfectly with no thing to describe.
(I refused to see Tim Burton's Dumbo, even if it was basically free. Tired of that guy's nonsense. Loved him in the 90s, but enuff's z'nuff. Everything else looked likewise lame, or I'd already seen it for free using my theater rewards points.)
Consequently, I was only going to the movies maybe once a week. And MoviePass liked that. So it rewarded me by working.
Then some cool stuff came out and there were some specialty screenings at our local Alamo I actually wanted to see and we were BACK IN BUSINESS! I started trying to use my MoviePass Uncapped account more regularly.
And thus began the "app errors"! Gasp!
(Please bear in mind, I am not complaining. And the guttering of the service did not surprise me. At all. It baffles and delights me to this day that MoviePass ever worked for a split second. I recount these adventures purely for your benefit and entertainment. I never expected my account to work at all, so every time it did was a blessing.)
As you might guess, these "app errors" made me rise up, awakening my ticket-seeking beast within, compelling me to spend every second of every day focusing all my effort and attention on getting a ticket with the service wherever and whenever possible.
If the service had worked, I would have just purchased a ticket once in a while, twice a week at most, but instead, I made it a point to try every trick in the book and rearrange my schedule to take a shot at a movie ticket EVERY STINKING DAY.
I enjoy life.
And my attempts were thwarted in every conceivable way. My favorite was when I had both my MoviePass account and my wife's account locked in with confirmed check-ins for tickets before walking up to the Regal theater...only to find the power went out and the place was closed.
Oh, did I mention my wife had a normal $9.95 three-per-month account throughout this adventure? She's had that account since July 2018 and we have been able to score our three tickets with that one without fail every month. It's been a nice un-mad constant in this mad inconstant world.
*
So, Uncapped Adventures!
I paid $14.95 per month for the privilege of being experimented on by the mad science experiment that is the MoviePass app for two-and-a-half months.
For my first trick, I was able to fairly reliably open the app at 8am-ish, lock in a ticket check-in, put the phone in airplane mode, and then open it, turn back on the Internet, and tap "Check In" once I arrived at the theater hours later. 60% of the time, worked every time. The app always shut down around 10am or 11am, flipping to "No more screenings" unless I pulled this airplane mode trick.
Well, then they closed that loophole. After a couple weeks, when I tried to pull this, the check-in wouldn't go through at the theater and a red alert would say, "This screening is no longer available." Gah!
So my next trick was to get to the theater as early as humanly possible to score a check-in before the app shut down for the day. Once you click "Check In," your card is loaded for 30 minutes. So I would find the earliest showtime at a theater and do the math, figuring the place would open about 20 minutes before that showtime, and thus I would plan to lock down my check-in about 50 minutes before that first showtime. (First showing of the day was at 11:30am? I'd aim to be at the theater with a loaded card by 10:41am!)
This worked, many times. There were days where I would race in and get my ticket on the theater lobby kiosk with only about a minute to spare before the check-in expired. On one instance, the check-in did, in fact, expire because the theater opened late. So I started building in five-to-ten-minute space cushions.
One time I had to call the manager at our Violet Crown theater to ask them to get down there and open the front door since they were only minutes from the first showtime and their website said they always open 20 minutes from the first showtime. Fortunately, a mob was gathering out there, so the manager couldn't identify me as the one who called and asked her to get it in gear and do her job and open the place. Happy ending: got my ticket just in time on that fine day.
Well, then MoviePass tightened the noose and made it hard for me to pull off that trick. At the time, I was able to check in on showtimes for later in the day and get evening tickets. They suddenly started enforcing a rule that they SAID they would be enforcing from the start but never did...the dreaded "YOU CAN ONLY CHECK IN FOR A SCREENING WITHIN A THREE-HOUR RANGE" rule.
This one zapped me. And was the end of my quest to get a ticket every day. Textbook example: our local Regal opened at 9:30am some mornings for 10am specialty kiddie movie screenings. On one dark morning, the earliest available screening was 12:30pm. So I planned to be within range and ready to check in at exactly 9:30am. Riding the bus over there (I ride the bus, in case my novel Round and Round! didn't give that away...), I checked the MoviePass app at 9:28am. All screenings available. I got cheeky at 9:29am and tried to check-in a minute early. Nope. It gave me the warning that you must check-in within the three-hour range. Oh well. Clock struck 9:30am a minute later and I tapped "Check In" and BOOM! "This screening is no longer available."
Refresh the screen and it reveals the "No more screenings" brick wall.
So you can't check in to a movie unless it's within three hours of a screening. And once it's within three hours of a screening, you can't check in.
Catch-22! Best catch there is!
Well, I STILL wasn't gonna let that stop me. I tried skewing reality slightly and going the Chat route. I remembered that in the past, if I got an unusual error on the app, I could sometimes contact them and they'd help me get a ticket. I would take a screenshot of the app, showing the available screening that should be providing me with a ticket, and that would usually get the job done.
(The MoviePass app's Chat was always very lottery-ticket-ish. Sometimes you'd get robo-replies followed by a "Nope." Sometimes you'd get no response at all. And sometimes you get a human being who would actually process a manual check-in for you so you could see the movie. They're fighting a war of attrition with their customers, hoping and praying the customer will give up, or that they will be in too much of a hurry and just buy the ticket out of their own pocket while waiting for a robo-"We haven't heard from you in a while, so we assume your problem is resolved. Thank you for contacting us!" reply. Not me, though! I can take my laptop to the theater and use magical technology to keep doing my professional daytime job while waiting for MoviePass Chat to respond. I have taken as long as an hour to fight my way to a free ticket through customer service. I was dangerously patient with them. "Beware the wrath of a patient man," as I heard somewhere.)
So yes, as I was saying, I bent reality a bit. Since in the past, they just required a screenshot of the app showing the available showtime and you tell them the error you're getting and they manually load your card with the funds and you're all set...I decided to take a screenshot of the app while screenings were still showing very early in the morning before they deactivated them. I would crop out the time, of course.
So when I got to the theater and came face to face with "No more screenings," I contacted Chat and went through the usual endless rigamarole while juggling work tasks and finally got to the part where I send them a screenshot.
Well...they looked down upon me and said, "NO."
My reality-distortion trickery was legit. But they said there was a mysterious "new algorithm" and they would no longer be processing manual check-ins. I would only be able to get a ticket if the app was up and functional within the three-hour window of the screening once the theater was open and available for ticket purchases. Which was almost never.
Bah. Oh well. Can't say I didn't try! I fought the 'Pass and the 'Pass won!
*
From there, access was scattershot. The seasons greyed. The flowers wilted. There would usually no longer be ANY screenings displayed at ANY time of ANY day. I'd check the app daily, but it was half-hearted. I would get a huge endorphin rush when I saw anything but the dreaded "No more screenings" screen. It was like having a scratch-off lottery ticket every day where you knew you were gonna lose, but you kept at it each day because you never know.
On the days where screenings displayed, I dropped everything and bolted to the theater to get my ticket before the app changed its mind. I usually scored. Unlike Beavis.
BUT THEN...MoviePass struck back with a WEIRD NEW TRICK!
I arrived at the theater on a day ending in "y" around noon with all movies and showtimes still displaying. And then when I tried to check in, it would give a new and improved app error, "Failed to create reservation." What what! Now, I'd seen that error before but usually because of a display error where it was SUPPOSED to be showing me "No more screenings" and I just needed to refresh it to stop it from enticing me with these ghosts of available check-ins past. And goodness knows, even when MoviePass "worked," you usually had to try your check-in three or four times before it would process and give you the sweet, sweet "Check-In Successful" screen. But this time was different. It still wouldn't process the check-in after several attempts and failed the same way each time instead of mixing up and providing me with a pleasant variety of failure and error notices.
So I did what I do and hit up MoviePass Chat on the app...and NOPE. They said this was the new normal. That EVEN IF SHOWTIMES ARE ACTIVELY DISPLAYING, there is no way to know if you can actually use them unless you go to the theater and try to check in. Only then will it let you get the ticket or display the app error, revealing you can't actually check in. I asked if they thought that was reasonable, to force someone to get within range of the theater before being able to find out if Lucy/MoviePass was going to yank the football/check-in. They admitted yeah, it kinda sucks and they'd pass along my feedback to the higher-ups.
I wasn't sure how to proceed from there, because even someone as deranged and committed to the cause as moi will not keep making the tricky trek out to the theater every day to find out if the app will work.
But then my decision got made for me!
Total blackout on all movies and showtimes for the next several days!
Woohoo! I actually prefer that to having movies and showtimes displayed that you can't actually access.
Buuuuut in the past, at most, total app blackouts like this lasted two or three days. So after five days, I contacted the overseas jokers robo-replying on the Chat app and asked if they would EVER offer ANY screenings on the app again. They said, "Uh...maybe?"
But lo and behold: check-ins were available the next day! I grabbed one!
And then there was a total blackout for a week.
I kvetched to Chat again and they were like, "Uh...derp!"
But lo and behold part two: check-ins were available the next day! And the next! And the next!
Things were looking up!
Would this bonanza of victory never end? It seemed not! The good times would surely roll on forever!
(Plot twist coming...)
And then they died.
On July 4 in the Year of Our Lord 2019, MoviePass went out of commission and are gone to this day, likely to never return.
*
It's entirely possible that my shenanigans exhausted them and put them out of business. Not apologizing. They offered a ridiculous, never-ever-possibly-sustainable service. I merely took them up on their offer. As the poet said: hate not the player, hate the game.
TLDR: Final tally! By the magic of MoviePass Uncapped, which I wielded for 2.5 months, I scored 30 theatrical movie tickets for 45 bucks. That's about $1.50 per ticket. Not bad.
I pity the fools that MoviePass suckered into buying annual accounts. They're out $120 and that's likely down the drain. These annual accounters had to pay direct from their bank account, so it's not like they can dispute the charge. That was by design. MoviePass knew what they were doing there after being forced to refund so many credit card charges during their chaotic 2018 (and 2019). These folks' accounts started in January, so they got about half a year's worth of service and I hope they were able to use and abuse it as much as me.
In these dire MoviePass-less days, I still attend the cinema. I mostly use rewards points, leftover rain check coupons, or even cold hard cash to attend the motion pictures. I haven't reverted to my old pre-MoviePass ways of only going to the movies once every couple months. I'm definitely more selective, but I still go every week. I developed the moviegoing habit and I enjoy it. And I think it's best to enjoy it in moderation.
To be TBH, I kinda hope MoviePass stays dead. My mind is less cluttered and frenzied without it. I can think now. I can breathe now. Sometimes I even talk to my wife and kids. Sometimes. Food tastes better. Smells smell sweeter. (Well, farts still stink, but not much you can do about that.)
But alas, even if they don't stay dead, Regal is rolling out their Unlimited plan, allegedly by the end of this month.
If you think I'll be able to resist that, you clearly haven't been paying attention and don't know me at all. I am an idiot. And I do idiotic things.
But everything I do, I do it to entertain you.
You're welcome.
(Oh, and P.S.: MoviePass' site is still technically there if you want to be notified when they go live again and are available to take your money before they go dark again.)
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
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