Hey, it works again. Roller coaster bankruptcy.
I have some movies listed in the local theater and no peak pricing even. I may try to sneak in a movie if they don’t go out of business again in the next hour.
I actually managed to see a movie tonight with no surcharge or anything. It was almost like the service I signed up for, except Mission Impossible and apparently future blockbusters are off limits.
It was strange, I almost felt like I was doing something wrong or sneaky by using the service. I guess I feel like I was rushing in there to catch a movie before another outage or perhaps the final one.
There have been threads about this in the past, how do people feel about them now with the surge pricing, monthly cost increasing to $15 (up from $10) and the blackouts on new releases?
I’m considering switching to Sinemia. The elite plan for $10 offers 2 films a month, and includes 3D films ($7 for 2 films a month w/o 3D). I didn’t like how moviepass doesn’t include 3D.
https://www.sinemia.com/new-plans
Even with unlimited films on moviepass, I usually only watched about 2 films a month. There weren’t enough films at the cinema that I felt it was worth going, even with the subscription service. Driving to the cinema, sitting through commercials, not being able to pause the film, etc. are all things that I do not have to deal with at home watching a movie. So a movie had to be halfway good for me to bother to watch it.
Are other people sticking with them? Cancelling? Using another streaming service?
Other than Moviepass, sinemia and the AMC stubs list, are there other options?
If you have Cinemark theaters in your area, there’s the Cinemark Movie Club. $8.99 per month for which you get one 2D movie ticket with subsequent tickets for $8.99 each. What I like is if you book online, you don’t have to pay the fee for selecting your seat.
AMC’s doing it, as is Cinemark as mentioned. Regal appears to have something in development.
I’d offer that in two years - maybe less - Sinema won’t be functional. Why would any of the big chains want to honor someone else when they can offer their own product?
I’m not sure I get the appeal of cinemark movie club. If you live in an high cost of living city like LA or NYC, where movie tickets are $20 its probably a good idea. But in Indiana a movie ticket runs $5-10 on average so thats about as much as I’d pay anyway.
I think Sinema sounds like my best option so far, mostly because I like the idea of seeing 3D movies and rarely see more than 2 movies a month (they have a 3D option that is 3 movies a month for $15, two for $10).
And we’re back to “no more screenings at this theater today”
I’ve also heard that Atom Tickets is good, with membership after you get 4 tickets you get 1 free.
My Movie Pass membership is a yearly membership that lasts until November, but I’ll be following this thread to see what alternates switch to.
$15 is still a steal. I want to see just how it will go with the blackouts of certain showtimes and 1,000+ releases being blocked for two weeks, but I can still just watch indie films first and then catch up on the large releases after two weeks (if their stated plan is *actually *what happens and they don’t change it again.)
I just saw my 78th film (not counting repeats) tonight (“The Cakemaker”) since getting my card in October of last year.
I think moviepass is a good deal for people like yourself who watch a lot of cinema movies. But while researching it, I saw that 88% of moviepass users only see 2 or fewer films a month. I fall into that group. I just can’t be motivated to go to the cinema unless there is something I really want to watch because I have so many streaming options at home.
Just in case you are not aware, Movie Pass is owed by Helios & Matheson. Last week their stock was at about 9 cents a share.
They did a reverse share of 250:1 and it raised the price to over $20/share overnight.
Today not even a full week later the stock is back down to 26 cents (as of 8-1-18 10:20am CDT).
That means it’s worth less than ONE TENTH of ONE CENT pre reverse split.
The reason I am saying this, is it cruising toward bankruptcy at an accelerated rate. If you want MP fine, but make sure you are able charge back (use a credit card, not debit card) and use it quickly before the company goes under.
Here’s a link to the company on Stocktwits, makes fun reading, unless you’re an investor (Sorry to anyone who invested)
I just don’t understand how they expect this to ever work. Did they think it would be like gym memberships were only 10% actually use it?
Yes. Or that they’d eventually have enough of a subscriber base that they could strongarm theater chains into cutting them ticket deals. Or both.
An article I read recently on the company said that if you see more than fourteen movies each year, the service is going to lose money (based on the nationwide average nine-dollar cost of a movie ticket). It’s even more of money loser for people in high-cost areas.
Yes, exactly. Mrs. Cups and I both have the AMC pass which “forces” us to go to 4 movies a month in order to make it cost effective. This is perfect for the summer when it’s action blockbusters galore, but once the fall and winter hits we’ll be lucky to find a single movie in a month we’re really jazzed about.
It’s probably no coincidence these passes came out now.
I might have read the same article. I was astounded to learn that Moviepass didn’t have any kind of relationship with the theaters giving them discounted rates. They just paid the same rate for tickets as anyone else. It sounds like their business model was to hope a whole lot of people bought subscriptions but never used them.
Their stated business model was to sell the subscribers’ personal information – e.g., tell local restaurants of your moviegoing habits so you get targeted marketing. They’d never done the groundwork to set that up, though, so they’ve been scrambling to monetize subscribers’ data (and not succeeding, apparently).
Their implied business model was that once they had enough subscribers and data that could demonstrate how much business they were “providing” to movie chains, they could make threats to those movie chains and thereby force them to grant MoviePass a cut of the profitable concessions sales. This, of course, made most all of the movie chains super un-enthusiastic about MoviePass.
The actual business model they seem to have settled on is to hype their brand, claim that selling volume offsets the increasing lots that each additional unit sold incurs, borrow lots of money until no one will loan them any more, then enter bankruptcy and find new jobs by marketing how big of a business they started. They’re currently at the “no one will loan them any more” stage of that plan.
I’ve got the AMC version and it’s been great for the summer as I’ve seen quite a few of the summer blockbusters in IMAX. I’m sure that’ll change as we move into fall, with fewer new releases, and then Oscar bait, which usually doesn’t need to be seen in IMAX.
So, I can see how AMC would make money, even if I’m not always buying concessions. I’m sure I"ll be down to one or two films a month in fall, especially with baseball playoffs and football season. And, of course, Navy Pier is basically shut down from after Halloween until spring, so going to the IMAX there isn’t as appealing unless it’s a film that needs the IMAX.
Moviepass reminds me of a 1999 dot com startup with no real business plan.
There’s a lengthy thread about MoviePass here which talks about a lot of the recent shenanigans.
They had a plan, five years ago, when it cost $30 a month and was marketed towards movie buffs and they were attempting to reach co-marketing deals with theater chains.
Then they all smoked a bunch of crack and decided they needed dramatic Hockey Stick Growth to attract new venture capital and changed to their current completely-unsustainable pricing model in the hopes that an influx of new subscribers could buy them negotiating power and allow them to borrow against subscription revenue.
I feel the original plan could have been successful and profitable as a niche product, if they kept the subscription price at a sustainable level and managed to negotiate kickbacks with select theaters. But they wanted to go big or go home. They went home.
Yeah, their business model relied on people buying passes evenly across all markets, instead of predominantly in $15/ticket markets, and only expected to break even from the subscription part. They wanted to sell data and use their size to negotiate discounts, but since no one epxects them to last now they don’t have any leverage. I wouldn’t count on them staying in business for long, so even if you go with them you should go ahead and figure out what your backup plan is.