MoviePass: The Ongoing Saga (Part 19 of ?)

MoviePass finally stopped sending me emails trying to get me to buy an annual plan that they won't technically allow me to buy, as it was only available for people with accounts ending before December 1 (mine ended December 2).

They sent me TWENTY-FOUR emails over the course of a MONTH trying to sell me on this annual plan that--AGAIN--they would not allow me to purchase.

Good news, though! They are now trying to sell me on their new MONTHLY plans with the jacked-up prices for the same level of garbage service/availability!

They sent me SEVEN emails over the past week trying to get me to buy one of these new plans.

At least I actually qualify to buy the thing they're trying to sell me this time.

Progress?

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Meanwhile, my wife's monthly MoviePass plan is still $9.95/month, no price increase. Though they inexplicably changed its monthly renewal date, pushing it back three days for no apparent reason. Just to bilk a few extra bucks by delaying service, probably? Whatevs.

We're still able to get our three monthly movies through the plan, so no worries there. I don't mind cruising over to the theater on my lunch break to grab tix before they shut down the app and go "No Screenings" for the day.

Heck, as a fun experiment, I managed to get all three of my monthly tickets in my first three days of service for the month. Total triumph! Absolute victory!

I mean, they made If Beale Street Could Talk, On the Basis of Sex, and The Upside available on three consecutive days, so you could do worse than those films. But just the simple fact that they made three different movies available three days in a row is major progress. A far cry from the days of Indivisible being the only movie available for weeks.

I highly recommend you try this experiment. Get your three tickets three days in a row! Nothing feels better than getting your money's worth from such a tricky company! NOTHING!

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MoviePass had a fire sale on their stock, since they're burning money.

Here's the prospectus.

And their parent company finally filed for their spinoff.

I don't understand what any of that means.

So let’s talk about the name of my current-favorite company, Sinemia.

I was critical of them in the past and have changed my mind about most aspects of the company. Their service works fine for me. 

But I remain critical of their name!

“Sinemia.” It’s weird, right?

Like “Sinema” would make sense, as it at least looks and sounds like “Cinema,” which makes sense as it’s a movie business. And it would give it a cheeky twist, like, “Oo my! A SINFUL cinema company!”

Or even “Cinemia.” That would work. A bit awkward, but still LOOKS like cinema, and sounds like a fun weirdly-spelled “cinema mania” company. “Cinemania” would be the best idea for a company title.

But they went with “Sinemia.” Where’d that word even come from?

Best as I can tell, the only prior usage of that combination of letters was in the disease “tyrosinemia.”

What is “tyrosinemia”? According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it is “a genetic disorder characterized by disruptions in the multistep process that breaks down the amino acid tyrosine, a building block of most proteins.”

Neato!

I dug a little deeper in the Academic literature and the earliest reference to the disease seems to be in a 2002 Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinavica issue. But I scanned the entire article and couldn’t find it, so I can neither confirm or deny this. This paragraph has been a boring waste of your time!

(FANCY ACADEMIC CITATION: "NOK2002 Scientific Program." Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinavica, vol. 80, no. 4, 2002, pp. 407 - 461)

The first reference to “tyrosinemia” I was legitimately able to verify was in a 2003 issue of Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. They discuss “type I hereditary tyrosinemia.”

(FANCY ACADEMIC CITATION: Lazure, Thierry, et al. "Congenital Anerythremic Erythroleukemia Presenting As Hepatic Failure." Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, vol. 127, no. 10, 2003, pp. 1362 - 1365)

That bit of fun aside, let’s discuss the claims made on Sinemia’s Wikipedia page.

They claim to be founded in 2014, but the only reference to back that up seems to be a dead LinkedIn link in a footnote at the bottom of the page. I am skeptical.

The earliest references I could independently verify on Sinemia were from early 2017.

So the mystery remains: who’s the lying liar who claims the company came into existence in 2014? And what’s the endgame on that nefarious deception? I mean, it’s not like backdating their company creation date to 2014 makes them predate MoviePass. MoviePass started in 2011.

So if Sinemia wanted to lie about their origin year, they should have chosen 2010. Then they could claim to be the first company to engage in this ticket-subscription-model cinemadness.

I will not rest until I solve this mystery.

Unless I get tired.

Then I’ll probably rest.

-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.