The Beloved and I both decided to shuffle the MoviePass emails straight to spam. Tried the Unsubscribe or Change Options link on the emails, but it didn’t work for me.
I’m sure everyone has been waiting for updates so here you are.
I received an email from MoviePass today and opened it. Here’s the outline of the current operation. They no longer offer free movie tickets. They instead offer discounts on movie tickets of “up to” thirty percent off. You can join with various plans. The cheapest plan (the Basic) costs “from” ten dollars a month. It entitles you to a discount on one to three movies a month.
Let’s do the math. Setting aside the “up to” and “from” qualifiers, I can pay ten dollars a month to get a thirty percent discount on three movie tickets. My local theater charges $9.75 for a regular adult ticket (although as a senior I can get tickets for $7.50). A thirty percent discount saves me $2.93 which is $8.79 for three movies. That’s not a bargain I’d pay ten dollars for.
Bumping this thread because Ted Farnsworth, formerly the CEO of Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc. (aka HMNY, parent company of MoviePass) pleaded guilty to securities fraud yesterday (link is to the Justice Department press release). According to a Justice Department attorney, “He concealed that MoviePass’ subscription model was a money-losing gimmick and falsely claimed that HMNY used artificial intelligence to monetize MoviePass’ subscriber data, among other misrepresentations.” In other words, he knew that the business model didn’t work but concealed that fact to keep the stock price up.
Edited to add that he can get up to 25 years in prison.
Just goes to show there’s no worse crime than stealing from rich people.
I don’t think anyone mentioned it in this thread, but there’s a documentary on HBO Max called “MoviePass, MovieCrash” about all of this nonsense. I watched it when it came out last summer. It’s pretty interesting.