they are making it very cheap because they are hoping to get big-data people as investors. The real business model is selling the movie-watching data habits of craploads of people to data-miners. Like Facebook, YOU are the product.
you MUST have a location-enabled smart phone to use the service. You sign up, they mail you a credit-card, you install the app on your phone. Then the SAME DAY you want to see a movie, you physically go to the theatre location, open the app, scroll through til you find your location, scroll again to find a movie that you want to watch, “buy” it, they load the movie price onto the credit card they sent you, and you go to the ticket counter and use that card to pay for the actual movie ticket.
it’s a single-use thing. You can only use it for yourself: no buying tickets for a date, or for groups of friends, or for your kids, or your spouse. Each person who is going to that movie using MoviePass has to have an individual account, their own smartphone, their own copy of the app, and their own MoviePass credit card.
It seems from looking into it that you can only see each movie title once. So if that’s true (its been hard to confirm or deny) then if you really like Spiderman Homecoming, you’re shit out of luck and have to pay the theatre full-price directly to see it again - you only can get it the once from MoviePass.
They’re still working on the app. I tried to check into Logan Lucky and the theaters weren’t showing up. I sent a text via the app (they’re usually VERY good at responding quickly) and got this:
I went ahead and bought a ticket. I have no doubt I’ll get reimbursed.
I think you have it backwards. What would happen is Movie Pass goes bankrupt and AMC ends up being their biggest debtor because unless I missed something Movie Pass doesn’t buy any tickets in advance.
$9.95 is just too cheap for this service. There’s no way they can sustain it.
Another theory is that AMC was planning to offer their own All-You-Can-View movie club and is pissed that their thunder got stolen. They’re fairly common in the UK, with leading chains CineWorld and Odeon both offering “Unlimited” screenings for £17.99 a month. So it’s not as if this model is unknown.
It works for me, even at the higher price point. I expect they’ll be out of business within a year or two but I’ll use them until they do.
They’ve experimented with some things that slightly aggravated me (for a while limiting how many tickets they’d sell for a specific theater in a day) but rarely have I wanted to use it and been unable to. Getting off of Discover as their backing provider really opened up the number of theaters I could use it at.
Having to submit a photo of every ticket stub now is a bit of an annoyance.
Only real drawback is that I can’t use it at several of the local area art house theaters that have gone to more expensive reserved seating, which Movie Pass won’t pay for.
Rarely want to see IMAX or 3D so that’s not a problem.
Actually, the biggest problem is I’d say that about once every two months I accidentally pay for the ticket with my red Wells Fargo debit card instead of my red Movie Pass debit card.
My understanding is that Movie Pass pays for the tickets the same way anyone else does; at the time of purchase. So there’s no point at which the theaters are owed money.
Yeah, I’ve heard both sides (that you can and can not see the same title more than once).
If you can’t, then it’s not as though anyone is going to see a movie a day because there’s just not that many movies to be seen at the large theater chains. Plus most people probably don’t have 2+ hours a day to spend in the theater watching marginal films just because they’re “free”.
This feels like the sort of thing where you see four or five movies the first week because you can and it rapidly tapers down to once or twice a month. Add in the hassles of seeing a movie with a date, friends or family using the pass and you might even still wind up buying tickets outside the MoviePass.
Not that it wouldn’t be a great deal for the right person but perhaps not as insane as it sounds at first blush.
If I were single this would be a can’t-miss deal. I’d be going to at least a handful of movies each month, and $9.95 is cheaper than just one ticket here. Most of the nearby theaters are Regal, but it sounds like they are covered.
But as someone with a family, I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle. I take my kids and nieces/nephews often; they don’t have smartphones so I’d have to buy their tickets normally. Because I have a job and family I don’t usually get to see more than 1-2 movies a month, so the savings becomes more marginal. Do you still get movie club points for your purchase?
If they’re still in business when my kids are out of the house in 10 years I’ll be all over it, I’d bet.
You’re right, it doesn’t make much sense for families. I wonder if MoviePass can expand this into a dating app akin to something like “It’s Just Lunch” - “It’s Just a Movie” where two single MoviePass customers can be matched up to see a movie they both plan to see.
How do you know they’re “marginal”? That they’re not heavily advertised? The best films I see are often the ones that get no TV commercials - nothing more than posters and trailers. In a big city like Chicago, there are dozens of films playing that get no love, yet are amazing.
Maybe you thought I meant “marginal” meaning “obscure art piece” when I meant “Emoji Movie” or “Baywatch”. But if someone has two hours to spend watching Emoji Movie just so they can personally pass judgment on whether it was worth it, more power to them.
Skammer, since you’re using a MasterCard Debit Card, yes, points count. I resisted AMC’s Premium Stubs card for years until I started using MoviePass, but I signed up the same time I got MoviePass and it’s been great. I rack up the points like crazy. I’m signed up with Regal too but I don’t go there as often (at least until AMC screws themselves over out of stupidity).
“Free” or not, I don’t go go see movies I don’t think I’ll like, so I haven’t seen The Emoji Movie or Baywatch. I do see a lot of small, obscure movies that I might not have otherwise seen if I had to pay full price.
I’m single and I enjoy watching movies. So I’ll go to watch a movie by myself.
That said, I’m looking for cheap entertainment. I use to go to a local second-run theater where you could watch movies for two dollars. But that theater closed in February and I’ve drastically cut back on my movie watching. I’ll now see five or six movies in theaters each year rather than the thirty or forty I used to go to.
So Movie Pass would be perfect for me. Except for that app thing. Not much sense in spending several hundred dollars in an attempt to live cheaply.
True, but let’s face it, it’s going to become harder and harder to avoid getting a smart phone, and this might be the thing that makes it worth it.
I avoided it for years as I have an income that varies too much to want to have any additional monthly expenses. But by purchasing an “unlocked” phone outright, I can explore different plans and jumping from carrier to carrier as I find better deals. Currently I’m using a Motorola Moto G4. It’s more than I wanted, but my previous one broke, and Best Buy didn’t stock the cheaper ones in-store. If you buy on-line, you can get the Moto E4 for $129.
Then you can put a SIM card from all these different carriers that resell service from the big four. I’m currently using a company called MintSim that resells T-Mobile. Like every other business, they have their lowest price for new customers, but you can buy a year’s worth of service - unlimited talk and text and 2 gigabytes of data a month - for $180, working out at a cost of $15 a month.
The combination of the phone and the service, plus whatever taxes and shipping, is going to work out at about $320. But if it enables you to use MoviePass, and see a new movie every single night, that is a year’s entertainment handled for less than $2 a day.
My suspicion is that Movie Pass’s original business model didn’t contain two aspects of how they’re implementing it today:
I suspect that they hadn’t planned on limiting it to “you can only buy one ticket per movie, per phone / app.” I’m fairly certain that they know that most people who go to movies go in groups, and for most of those groups (i.e., families), one person buys the tickets for the group.
I’m also fairly certain that they had intended it that you would buy the ticket directly through the app, and that they hadn’t planned on the user having to present the special debit card at the theater to get their ticket.
I imagine that both of those “features” wound up being implemented when they ran into obstacles in their original business model. And, both of them make it a more awkward service to use.
The debit card may not necessarily sound like a big deal, but (a) it does mean that, if someone hears about Movie Pass, and says, “that’s cool! I’d like to use that to see a movie tonight!”…they can’t. It means that the user has to wait for Movie Pass to send them the debit card – and that runs counter to the instant gratification that modern online purchases and smartphone apps have trained consumers to expect. And, (b) as someone mentioned upthread, it can also lead to confusion among their users, if they accidentally try to use a different card at the theater.
At least in my area, more theaters are offering reserved seating for movies (Marcus and AMC are two of the big chains in Chicago, and they both offer it). It sounds like Movie Pass doesn’t have support for reserved seating, and that’s an issue, too.
In short, I suspect that they aren’t a sustainable business, unless they can start to address these issues.
You want they should come to your home, pick you up in a limo, carry you in a throne from the car to the theater, then hand-feed you grapes and popcorn, hold your cup and straw while you take a sip during the movie? What else can they do to make your life easier?
I’ve had MoviePass for a few years now and I love it. Here in New York City the monthly plan is a bit more expensive to compensate for insane NYC ticket prices. Still, if you see three or more movies a month, it easily pays for itself. I’m a movie fan and typically see at least one or more movies a week - frequently by myself - so it works great for me.
I’ve had no trouble getting the MoviePass credit card accepted at any theater. Anywhere that takes MasterCard should work. I suppose the only exception would be theaters that don’t take credit cards. In addition to NYC, I’ve successfully used it in Las Vegas, Miami, Austin, San Francisco, Atlanta, Orlando, and Portland.