August, 2017
Making
Friends
Right off the bat, anyone and everyone was
nay-saying the company or scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the
heck was going on.
AMC was the most vocal and brutal critic
of MoviePass, calling their business model unsustainable and saying MoviePass
users were not welcome at their theaters.
The automated ticket-sale kiosks at AMC
did not get this memo and were perfectly happy to sell tickets to MoviePass
users.
AMC’s main claim to rage against MoviePass
was their fear that such an impossibly low price would make patrons devalue the
moviegoing experience and refuse to pay full price for a ticket after MoviePass
inevitably went out of business.
Something so overpriced was well overdue
for a devaluation, countered MoviePass users and the general public.
Plus, the true story was that AMC had been working for years to launch their
own monthly-fee subscription service and couldn’t get the studios to sign on.
They were bitter at MoviePass for pulling it off and going national.
And we all laughed at sour-grapes AMC.
At the time…
September 2017
Too Much, Too
Soon
MoviePass hit 400,000 subscribers within a
month of The Drop.
They were not prepared. (In many ways, they were not prepared.)
MoviePass card shipments were massively
delayed. My card took over five weeks to arrive and my situation was not abnormal.
Their customer service got a bad
reputation immediately, as they were unresponsive or robotic.
Neither of these developments boded well
for a company that was already facing skepticism, mockery, or hostility from
every corner of social media, mainstream media, financial experts, and the
movie theater-industrial complex.
Nevertheless, MoviePass persisted.
And their customers were happy as clams,
seeing as many movies as they could possibly see.
And the customer joy was the seed of MoviePass’
downfall, as they were making MoviePass bleed money faster than their venture
capital and subscription revenue could possibly transfuse it.
December 2017
WAY Too Much,
Too Soon
MoviePass hit that magic number of
1,000,000 subscribers.
Probably goosed by Costco offering an
annual plan at their stores ($90/year, with a Fandor subscription bundled in),
creating box office pile-ups of noobs who didn’t know how to activate or use
their card.
The app was holding strong, no major
public scandals of note.
Behind the scenes, though, Helios jacked
up their ownership stake in MoviePass from 62.4% to 91.8% by floating them $90
million in advance cash.
“So
far, so good,” as the man said to every window he passed as he fell from
the building.
February 2018
DOUBLE WAY Too
Much Too Soon
MoviePass doubled its membership in two
months to 2,000,000 subscribers.
And they even offered an annual plan to
select early adopters for a price equaling about $7.50 per month.
(Yours truly rode that gravy train and
yours truly is still technically on
that same train, though it derailed terribly, as you will see…)
March 2018
Ups and Downs
In a head-spinning move, MoviePass dropped
its monthly fee to $7 for new monthly subscribers. (I will admit, I had a
ridiculous sense of annoyance that I paid $7.50/month just a month earlier and
thought maybe I should have waited
for that offer and then I would be paying 50 fewer cents per month!)
But in their first canary-in-the-coalmine
act of deliberate self-sabotage/throttling, they blocked access to Red Sparrow screenings in certain
regions. I didn’t experience this directly. (Unfortunately, they didn’t block Red Sparrow from me and thus I had to
sit through it, UGH.) But it was widely reported and heavily criticized.
Also CEO Mitch Lowe joked in a meeting
about using their location services on people’s phones to monitor everyone in a
very creepy way. He apologized in the first of his renowned “Awkward Oopsie”
emails to all MoviePass users and stated that they would be respectful of
people’s privacy and not abuse their ability to track users.
Sure…
April 2018
Capitalism
MoviePass bought Moviefone from Verizon in
exchange for some super-valuable, never-gonna-go-down MoviePass stock. (As of September 2018, it’s currently selling
for about a penny a share…)
MoviePass’ financial statements were
released and made waves, revealing they were bleeding $20 million per month.
Subscribers were suddenly restricted from
seeing movies a second time with the app. Surely, that would solve the company’s
financial problems!
In other good news, the unlimited plan was
removed as a choice for new subscribers and replaced with a plan that limited
them to three movies per month (ominously foreshadowing a future change…) along
with a three-month trial of some nonsense called “I Heart Radio.”
Lowe hinted the unlimited plan might never
be coming back.
May 2018
Psych! 101
Just kidding! The unlimited plan was
brought back a couple weeks later.
The chain-yanking CEO addressed this with
these wise words: "We just always
try different things…Every time we try a new promotion, we never put a deadline
on it."
He sounded like Joker in The Dark Knight: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan?...I just DO THINGS!”
So that’s nice.
Weirdly, MoviePass left the thrice-monthly
plan as an option on their site for $8/month. This left many scratching their
heads, as an extra $2 monthly would allow an additional 27 potential theatrical
experiences in that time period.
Looking back, I angrily blame the people
who signed up for that limited plan for giving the notion of three-movies-a-month
some respectability.
Oh, and the company bled out an additional
$40 million by the end of the month.
June 2018
Sloughing
Toward Disaster
MoviePass hit 3,000,000 subscribers.
Cinemadness:
Live Your Best MoviePass Life is
published, improving the lives of all who read it.
Getting the last laugh against their
bitter rival. AMC announces its own, subscription-based movie ticket service,
AMC Stubs A-List. Their service allows subscribers to see three movies each
week at AMC theaters for a $20 monthly fee.
MoviePass responds to AMC’s announcement
on Twitter with ill-advised derision (Which would later come back to bite them
when AMC’s program stayed reliable and MoviePass fell apart, fueling a
mass-migration of disgruntled MoviePassers over to AMC).
MoviePass created mucho customer
antagonism by rolling out new fees for their service. In the first of many corporate Orwellian
moves, they called it “peak pricing.” (We all rolled our eyes, instantly
recognizing it as Uber-style “surge pricing.”) For allegedly-popular movies and
showtimes, they started adding between $2 and $8 per ticket for subscribers.
This included Sunday evening screenings of movies that had been out for weeks,
resulting in customers posting selfies of themselves in empty theaters they
paid “peak pricing” ticket premiums on, captioning them with some variation of,
“WTF MOVIEPASS!?”
With supreme confidence after this
customer-pleasing move, they launched a $164 million bond sale.
Their movie company, MoviePass Ventures,
released two films, American Animals and
Gotti. This was a really odd situation/scandal,
as people were using their MoviePass cards to buy tickets to MoviePass movies.
There were also extremely credible
allegations of MoviePass manipulating the Rotten Tomatoes score for Gotti. MoviePass’ ad campaign for the film
on Twitter defiantly boasted, “Audiences loved Gotti but critics don’t want
you to see it!”
Points for gumption.
They started selling merchandise. I gleefully
snapped up a MoviePass shirt for $25, including shipping. After waiting about
as long as it took for my card to initially arrive, I was the proud owner of a MoviePass
shirt that cost almost as much as four
months of the service with my annual plan.
I have deeply mixed feelings about the
shirt. And the company.
July 2018
System
Failure
MoviePass blatantly intentionally throttled
and sabotaged their app.
They did not decide to be honest and say,
“We’re broke!”
Instead, they fed us one extremely weak
rationalization after another.
In interviews, they defended not offering
all films as similar to how not all movies are available on Netflix. (Movie
theaters are not streaming platforms. In any way. I checked.)
For a time, MoviePass said they would reimburse
subscribers who were forced to buy tickets with their own money.
I hope you had good luck getting those
refunds. Most didn’t.
In a wild move even by MoviePass
standards, parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics filed a Universal Shelf
Registration Statement with the SEC to let them raise $1.2 billion in operating
funds over the next three years. While in total financial freefall.
The MoviePass app died altogether on July
26, claiming “technical difficulties.” Well, their app’s check-in processor wasn’t
paid, so they shut MoviePass down, screeching check-ins to a halt. Yes,
technically, those were “technical difficulties.” But that was an extreme
stretch, yet another example of MoviePass’ dubious and dishonest moves. Many
more to come.
MoviePass scrimped and managed to scrounge
up $5 million to get their app functional. They sort of succeeded. The app
started working once in a while, but it was never reliable again.
The new normal (still the norm to this
day, at the time of writing this) became: The app starts each morning
displaying ALL showtimes and ALL movies. And then all but the “MoviePass-permitted”
showtimes and movies disappear, usually between 9am and 11am.
And to this day, MoviePass enrages new or
longtime customers by making them waste a drive across town, as they see these
showtimes available on the app before they leave, only to find them gone by the
time they get to the theater.
Oh, and MoviePass announces plans to raise
the monthly subscription fee to $15.
August 2018
“’Tis But a
Flesh Wound!”
Just kidding again!
They decided not to raise the monthly fee
to $15, after all!
It would stay at $10!
That’s good, right?
Wrong.
They decided—instead—to cut everyone down
to three movies per month.
The unlimited party was over.
They used absolutely despicable
weasel-wording in their email about it: “We
believe that the new plan we’re introducing will be attractive to the majority
of our members…these changes cater to the majority of our movie-going
community.”
You can take a guess as to how attractive
members found this new plan to be. (Answer: not very much.)
The constant website crashes, service
outages, blockbuster-throttling, showtime-cutting, two-major-movie limitation
antics became mere background noise.
Countless irritated, exasperated MoviePass
customers had enough of this horsin’ around and decided to quit.
But then if they tried to use the service
again before their subscription term ran out, the app trickily re-enrolled them
when they logged into it.
No goodwill was earned by this nonsense.
The service also announced an end to its
controversial surge (“peak”) pricing and ticket verification. Ticket verification
continued for many users even after they were forced into the three-monthly
plan.
But amid all this chaos, annual subscribers
(such as myself) were reassured none of these changes would affect them. In
multiple places. Multiple times. On the app’s FAQ section and in one of our “Embarrassed
Mitch” emails where he specifically told us, “Quarterly and annual subscribers will not be impacted until their
renewal date.”
We annuals all exhaled in relief, feeling
smugly superior to those poor proletariat monthly users, and continued to enjoy
the movies in style.
August 24, 2018
The Second MoviePass
Day That Will Live Forever
This was the official end of MoviePass as
we know it.
The most dishonorable day in the history
of MoviePass.
August
24, 2018: The day they sent The Email out to annual users.
Snapping their fingers like Thanos, they
killed off unlimited MoviePass for all users forever.
This was weasel-evil corporate scumbaggery
on the grandest scale.
Worded in such a ridiculously douchey way: “After experimenting with different models and options, we believe that
our current monthly plan captures the need of our community.”
And we all KNEW they KNEW they were doing
wrong when they defensively included this gem in their message:
“As
of today, aligned with Section 2.4 of our Terms of Use, your annual
subscription plan will now allow you to see 3 movies a month instead of the previous
unlimited offering.”
I repeat: “aligned with Section 2.4 of our Terms of Use.”
Citing the dastardly “Terms of Use” by section number to justify their evil!
Insult? Let’s throw some injury in there,
as well.
Hell is not nearly warm enough for the person
who made the decision to communicate in that manner and deliver it without
warning.
They offered partial prorated refund, you
know, “if this new plan no longer aligns
with your viewing preferences.” (That’s a mild way of acknowledging their
rug-yanking-from-beneath-your-feet.)
Many tried to get their refund.
Many failed.
So where do we go from here?
Let’s consider the alternatives…
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
(I also wrote the authoritative literary work on MoviePass, Cinemadness: Live Your Best MoviePass Life)
No comments:
Post a Comment