It appears to be. Our neighbor recently used her account on her phone, then we used both my account and her brother’s account on my phone.
Don’t order those extra Movie Passes just yet. While you can apparently log into other accounts on your phone, you can’t activate more than one card on a single phone. The wife’s card arrived in the mail, and while I could log into her account on my phone, we could not activate it. Finally we got her Thai-purchased phone registered with a US-based app store, and as soon as she logged into her account on it, it asked her to activate the card.
I’d probably be careful about using other cards on one’s phone. Looking over the literature, it seems the system may not like it even if it is possible.
Update: The wife managed to wrestle down a Movie Pass app from a US app store. We went to see a movie yesterday – Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, which we loved – and both successfully used our Pass, me using the one I registered with on my phone and hers the one from her phone. So this seems very worth the effort to get. And they still honor our movie-extras card at this particular chain, so we still earn free tickets, free popcorn etc.
When the wife’s card arrived in the mail, we tried registering it on my phone, but it would not register. Once she got the app downloaded on her phone, no problem, it registered.
However, our neighbor. She registered her card on her phone. And she also registered her brother’s card on her phone. Her brother lives in San Francisco and does not have a smartphone. That may be why she still has his card, hasn’t mailed it to him, but she swears she registered both cards on her phone and routinely uses both cards here to get a ticket for her and one for a friend when they go see a movie, using her account for her card, then logging out and logging into her brother’s account, all on the same phone. She even used her brother’s card to get a ticket for my wife before we got her her own card, so I know that part is true, that she can at least use both accounts on one phone.
The AMC chain is getting annoyed at being given free money, and has instructed their staff to not credit MoviePass customers with Stubs points (their loyalty program.) The solution is to use their kiosks to buy tickets and scan the card on those.
They’re probably right to be annoyed, this is unlikely to be good for the movie industry long term. They’re burning massive amounts of investor capital to take a huge loss on buying these tickets for everyone in the hopes they can eventually coerce the movie theaters on giving them good deals on tickets or a kickback from something like concessions. Their goal is to lose a few billion but make the theaters realize they’re dependent on moviepass and it’s members to get people coming to their theaters so they become a powerful player in the market that can dictate terms to the movie theaters.
If/when it fails, the people who got used to paying $10/mo for movies will probably not be thrilled by going back to paying $12 per movie and will see fewer movies, hurting the long term outlook of the theater industry. And even if it doesn’t fail (and it seems quite likely to fail to me), then they’ve got this outside entity wielding a lot of control over their business.
This is a rare instance of an American corporation looking out for their own long term interests rather than just being happy to cash in on an unsustainable short term boost.
I just used my Stubs card with my MoviePass yesterday at an AMC so this policy is by no means universal yet.
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I pointed out earlier in the thread, two chains in the UK, Cineworld and Odeon, have had all you can view programs for years.
I think MoviePass is betting the whole pile that in the future this will become the way people pay to watch films in a theater.
Theater attendance has been going down for a while (with all the competition from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.) and cinema owners, as well as the movie studios, are scrambling for a way to fill up the seats.
If you can get more butts in seats that’s great because (I believe) concessions is where (the cinemas) make most of their money. The studios make more too from a larger gate (at first)*
I suspect MoviePass feels that monthly subscriptions to theaters is the future, just like unlimited Netflix viewing became the dominant successful model (as opposed to renting each film separately). I believe MoviePass thinks that once enough people get addicted to this method of movie viewing AMC and the others will have to let MoviePass in on the concessions, and/or help subsidize MP’s low monthly rate because if they don’t, they will lose lots of bux to other chains that stick with MP.
The fact that MP does this through a credit card purchase and not through some contractual deal with the cinemas means the cinemas can’t put an end to it. As well, once MoviePass gets the lion-share of the market it will be far too late for AMC, etc., to offer monthly subscriptions of their own especially as those would be limited to only one cinema chain. AMC can see how this will play out which is why they’re so pissed. But I think they (and the studios) will end up doing alright after the dust settles.
MP’s model here isn’t so crazy after all. They’re losing tons of dough upfront to corner the market. It’s an investment.
**TL; DR: **
New cinema business paradigm:
Ultra-low-subscription fee movie ticket “middleman” gets millions more viewers in cinemas.
Cinemas and studios resist at first.
Once it’s realized it’s all about selling a BUNCH more concessions and gaining valuable data-mining, the cinemas and studios relent because…
The only thing that’s changed is where their revenue comes from… not how much they are making.
*Eventually the studios are going to have to ask for a lower % of the gate because in the MP system there will be less money per ticket. The studios will then want a cut of concessions. Which should work out fine because if enough people go to the theaters a whole lot more concessions will be sold.
ETA: And, oh yeah… once this all takes off and becomes the new paradigm, the subscription price WILL go up. But not so much that moviegoers revolt and the whole thing crashes. Maybe from $9.95 / month to $15 or $20 / month.
FWIW Cinemark just rolled out their new loyalty program. $8.99 a month includes one free ticket, 20% off concession and the ability to buy another ticket at $8.99. Your monthly tickets roll over each month, which is nice.
Most definitely not the same deal as moviepass but…it’s a thing.
As I said, two different UK chains are offering the MoviePass model for unlimited films in their theaters for £17.90 per month, and have been doing so for years. They exclude the London West End locations, and they issue a card with a photograph so they can’t be shared, but it’s obvious that some price point works. Here’s Cineworld’s one and here’s Odeon’s one.
I’m fairly sure both have been offering these programs for quite some time.
Here’s my experience so far. My wife and I signed up, got our cards within 2 weeks, a few days ago. We went to the theater tonight, clicked on a movie showtime, and got an error message saying “your account is an incorrect status to make reservations”. Apparently, the app was supposed to ask us to confirm our card numbers, but it hadn’t, and there is no way to enter it without the app asking.
I messaged customer service - they have yet to respond, several hours later. Looking around online, some people on reddit suggested the workaround of getting an e-ticket, which can be done without the app having registered your card, and which basically activates your account. Unfortunately, there are very few e-ticket theaters in this area, and the only one near my zip code appeared to be a Bollywood theater. So I selected an e-ticket for a movie there, which I wasn’t actually interested in seeing. That counted as my movie for the day, but it appears to have activated my account; the “MoviePass Card” screen now shows the card number instead of “registration processing”. I’ll try again this weekend, and post an update here.
I messaged Customer Service weeks ago with a question and never got an answer. It was something I eventually figured out for myself.
Thinking about it, *CostCo *would not be selling one year subscriptions to MoviePass if they didn’t have some assurance that they will be around for a least a year. *CostCo *are no fools, and their customer satisfaction and retaining members for years is the whole basis of their business model, and MoviePass failing to deliver would reflect poorly on them and cause dropped memberships.
I guess I probably had seen this earlier but tuned it out, because I did try to use MoviePass last night only to wonder why the cinema wasn’t showing up. Surprise! It was a Landmark (alas). Shame because they’re actually a pretty significant chain up here in NorCal, but there are also few movies they’re showing that can’t be seen somewhere else with a little initiative so those titles will involve a bit more planning and geographic strategizing.
Yeah, I missed a few movies because they were only playing at either Landmark or ArcLight. Most movies play in other theaters here in Chicago, but I missed the recent First They Killed My Father, and the 2017 Foreign Language Oscar nominee Land of Mine because of it. I will never forgive them.
Today is my 1st year anniversary of using MoviePass. Last year on this day I used my card for the first time to see Solace, with Anthony Hopkins. It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I saw it. It was one of those smaller movies that came and went in a week, and that I never would have seen if not for MoviePass. I keep track of all my movies and when I used MoviePass, and since I activated my card I’ve seen 223 movies using it. I do love it so.
Slashfilm called out AMC - MoviePass Has Turned AMC Theatres Into a Petulant Child. From the article:
Recently, AMC Theatres has been more passive aggressive about their attempts at creating MoviePass restrictions. Since AMC Theatres can’t stop customers from paying with MoviePass, instead they’re punishing those customers by not allowing them to earn points on their Stubs or Stubs Premiere card for their ticket purchases made with a MoviePass card. It’s basically the movie theater chain equivalent of, “Fine, you can play in our sandbox, but you can’t use our bucket.” Give me a break.
Other AMC Theatres have been more bold (or maybe they’ve misunderstood how they’re supposed to handle MoviePass customers). At least one AMC Theatres location in Illinois stopped customers from buying a ticket with MoviePass altogether, saying that they don’t accept the card. I know this because my twentysomething cousin was turned away from this location on several occasions until he eventually decided to go elsewhere.
On the other hand, the MoviePass Mastercard AND the Stubs card both work perfectly well at the AMC kiosks, so as long as you take the MeatBot in the box office out of the equation, you can use both. Unless AMC has some super-secret database of every single Mastercard number and can block those numbers associated with MoviePass, there is no way to make this happen.
Slashfilm also confirmed what I had suspected earlier in this thread:
In Deadline’s recent report on the newly revealed yearly subscription plan that MoviePass is offering for a limited time, they offered up this nugget of information:
“AMC Theatres reportedly shopped around their version of a monthly ticket price plan to the major studios, which Deadline heard was met with a cold response.”
And there it is. Now this all makes perfect sense. AMC Theatres wasn’t against the idea of MoviePass. Instead, AMC Theatres was upset that MoviePass was able to succeed where they had failed. The reason AMC Theatres couldn’t get their own subscription plan to work (something we suggested they should do if they hated MoviePass so much), is because studios were leery about renegotiating how much money they would get from any ticket sales tied to the potential subscription plan. MoviePass doesn’t have that problem, because they’re paying full price for tickets. So now AMC Theatres is retaliating by making the movie-going experience for MoviePass customers downright inconvenient.
I know if I were an AMC stockholder, I would be seriously questioning the sanity of the current AMC management, and would be demanding the resignation of their CEO.
In the past three months AMC has gotten $350 from me through Moviepass, plus I’ve signed up for the $15 Stubs account which I never ever would have considered otherwise. Without Moviepass I doubt I would even have passed $50 as I would only have gone to the cheaper matinees.
I used the kiosk tonight (saw “All the Money in the World”) and it accepted my Stubs account.
Yeah, AMC doesn’t get it. They should be acquiring MoviePass instead of trying to roll their own which will fail.
You guys understand that movie pass is losing money by the billions, right? It’s not a sustainable model. They’re burning cash to either leverage their influence to get power/money from movie theaters, or they’re going to collapse (much more likely IMO) and leave people bitter about the idea of paying $12 for a movie and a reduced moviegoing population. Either one is likely to be bad long term for the theaters.
Once moviepass collapses, that would be the time for these theaters to launch their own version of it to try to recapture some of that audience.
I don’t understand AMC’s objection either. It would seem to me that (at least in the short-term) this is a big boon, because MP is paying them full price for the tickets. People with MP will go see a lot more movies than they otherwise would, and that extra money is going straight to AMC, along with any extra concessions they purchase. A friend of my theorized that AMC thinks when MP eventually fails (and it likely will, I can’t see how they’ll stay profitable), if MP catches on people will be used to paying $10/month for nearly unlimited movies and will balk at going back to the regular ticket prices. I dunno.
EDIT: Ninja’d by SenorBeef
It is a credit card that MP sends you, right? Are they hoping you’ll use it for other purchases (like every other ‘store’ credit card like Target or Macys or whatever)? Are they making money from selling your purchasing habit info? I just don’t see what’s in it for MP.