It’s a debit card, yes, but it can only be used to purchase movies. You use the app to enter a movie you’re going to see, and they pre-load the card with the amount the ticket will cost.
They do sell the movie viewership data to advertisers, yes, but that’s worth a fraction of a cent per movie. I often hear people say that’s how they make their money (they’re partially owned by an analytics firm) but I can assure you no one is going to pay $12 per movie to see what you saw. That’s as implausible as a restaurant giving you free $20 meals to see what appetizer you get with your entree or a grocery store giving you $50 in free groceries to see what you buy. That data is worth a fraction of a cent per user per transaction, not $12.
They’ve been funded by venture capital to the tune of billions. Their plan is to try to dominate the market - imagine if 50%+ of the moviegoing public was coming in through moviepass - and then they can say “oh hey, we’re going to stop letting moviepass customers go to your theater unless you give us X” - X would be heavily discounted tickets, kickbacks on concessions, something along those lines, so that they can try to actually turn a profit on this in the long term. Their goal is to become so necesary to the movie theaters that they can throw their weight around before they run out of money.
That’s why AMC doesn’t like this. They either become subservient to moviepass, or moviepass fails and after a year of going to movies for $10/mo they’re not going back to paying $10+ per movie. Either outcome is bad long term for them.
My very strong suspicion is that MoviePass (and their investors) are hoping that they can sell the company. That’s likely why they lowered their prices so dramatically a few months ago – in an effort to build up their subscription base to a level where they look attractive to a potential buyer.
I joined Cinemark’s program to check it out. Another nice thing it does is waive the fee for online/phone app purchases and you can scan the purchase code at the ticket takers podium. You can bypass the whole outside ticket buying, or having to print the tickets at the inside kiosk. This comes in handy as I’ll often catch the first mainee on a weekday and stay for a double feature.
There’s an article in The New York Times today about MoviePass. It says, “Mr. Lowe [MoviePass CEO], who previously sparred with studios as president of Redbox, the kiosk company that rents DVDs for $1 a day, believes that ticketing can at least be a break-even business for MoviePass. The real treasure in this venture, he contends, is the trove of data about consumer tastes and habits that MoviePass can collect. It hopes to sell that data to studio marketers.”
I’m skeptical about the business model. It seems doomed to failure. But I’ve been wrong before. Many, many times before.
What they really need to start doing, and I can’t believe it’s not a thing yet, is to put ads on their app. You HAVE to use the MoviePass app to use the MoviePass card to see a movie, so there’s a captive audience for at least a few seconds. I wish they would. Then maybe people will stop coming up with scenarios of what they think MoviePass is up to, then condemning MoviePass for it.
No one is condemning movie pass. People in this thread have said that moviepass makes money by collecting data, which is very off by several orders of magnitude, and didn’t know why AMC was so mad at getting free money, so I tried to explain it.
15 second ads aren’t going to pay for $12 movies either, and most likely will just really piss off the customer base - people go apeshit to have ads in something they’re subscribing to, witness the backlash against hulu.
I don’t know what you mean by “coming up with scenarios” - it’s not a big mystery here. No business model is viable for them except to grow big enough to influence the way the movie industry works. They’re nowhere near profitability in their current model, obviously - they’re just trading venture capital money for subscribers and influence. What else could they be doing?
That’s my assumption, as well – that they’re burning money at this point, hoping to get to the point where they’re big enough that they can either (a) get bought out by someone, or (b) force a change in their relationship with the theater chains.
I still suspect that the way that they’re operating right now (requiring the special debit card, requiring each ticket to be purchased on a different smartphone / debit card) isn’t how they’d originally designed their business model, but that they discovered that they weren’t able to pull off their original plan.
Their customer service is terrible. Weeks later, maybe a couple of months by now, they still have not gotten back to me. As well, we have a minor issue with the wife’s account and have sent them a message twice over the past three weeks or so, and nada. If anyone ever hears from them, I’d like to know how you got a response.
App needed an update, so I go to update it, and I get “this application is not compatable with your device”
That makes all of zero sense, so I google around - apparently they’re blocking updates for rooted phones. I’m guessing that’s some sort of misguided attempt at fraud prevention, but certainly annoying to the rather significant minority of people with rooted phones.
You can still manually install the updated APKs, though, so it doesn’t actually prevent anything. Just extra hassle.
Also, they’ve apparently changed the rules to only seeing each movie once - I was under the impression that that rule was always part of the deal, so I’ve never tried to do that. A lot of people on reddit are super pissed about it though, cancelling their memberships and throwing tantrums. I guess they’ll go back to paying $50 a month for movies just to show what a bad deal moviepass is now due to that rule.
Movie Pass is running out of money so it’s probably not worth worrying about for too much longer anyway.
People were abusing the privilege to see unlimited movies by giving tickets to friends. If you can only see a movie once, users have to forgo their chance to see the movie in order to give the ticket away.
Thanks for the information about rooted phones. I keep forgetting to join. Now I won’t bother since it apparently won’t work right on my phone anyway.
Only for new sign ups - old accounts weren’t affected - but yeah they reversed that.
I’ve been wondering how long this would last. I’m curious to see what the effects will be when it fails. I suspect a lot of those people who got used to seeing movies for $10/mo will not be happy about going back to seeing movies for $10+ each, and movie viewership will plummet substantially. Which is what AMC feared and why they’ve been fighting moviepass.
The theaters will probably have to scramble to come up with their own plans to try to fill that deficit. It certainly won’t be as generous as moviepass. I’m expecting something like 4 movies a month for $20, maybe with some token discount on concessions, that only works for their chain. Perhaps with limitatons like not being able to see new movies on opening weekend or restricting the number of prime time showings.
Cinemark already introduced their version of Moviepass. It’s called the Cinemark Movie Club and costs $8.99 per month. For that you get one ticket for free and any subsequent tickets also cost $8.99. There is a supplement for premium movies (3D, XD, etc.) but there’s no charge for buying tickets in advance on the website (while there is a $1.50 “convenience fee” if you’re not a member). My local multiplex is Cinemark so I joined this service.
Well, movie viewership for MoviePass subscribers might well decline, but I strongly suspect that, even with MoviePass’s growth in its subscriber base once they lowered their price last year, their subscribers are still a very small minority of the overall U.S. moviegoing market.
Their membership is around 3m from what I’ve read, which, while a small portion of the population as a whole, probably encompasses the vast majority of people with the highest rate of movie viewership. Anecdotally I saw in a reddit thread that someone in a movie theater estimated that half their customers were moviepass, but I don’t have any data on that. But it’s likely that moviepass subscribers have many times the movie seeing rate of the average person. It’ll be enough to make a dent.
Just because I was curious if I could find info on how big their membership base is (because it doesn’t look like they’re willing to come out and say it):
This Variety article from March quotes MoviePass’s CEO claiming that they would have 5 million subscribers by the end of 2018, and account for 20% of U.S. ticket sales.
This Business Insider article from today (behind a paywall) indicates that MoviePass currently claims to account for 6% of U.S. ticket sales. Assuming that the members-to-ticket-sales proportion for what they had been projecting for year-end holds, that 6% (if accurate) suggests a current membership base of about 1.5 million members.
It definitely makes sense to me that MoviePass members are more frequent viewers than the general population; whether or not their members are the vast majority of frequent movie viewers is much harder to tease out.
Well it would just make sense for anyone who’s in the top bracket of the movie viewing public to have moviepass, since it would be extremely cost effective for them. It seems unlikely as cinephiles they’d be unaware of it.
If we’re looking at it purely from a cost-per-movie-viewed perspective, I’d agree.
As we beat to death in this thread a few months ago, some of the limitations with MoviePass (must have a smartphone, must have a separate account and debit card for each person, can’t reserve seats at theaters that offer reserved seats) may well be reasons why it’s not a no-brainer for all frequent movie viewers.