You may be familiar with a service called MoviePass. It strives to be the Netflix of movie theaters. For what used to be their unlimited plan at $9.95 per month, it allowed you to see a movie every 24 hours at thousands of theaters nationwide. The app is a simple concept. Once you were within a certain distance at your local movie theater, you would bring up the app, select that movie theater, then select your movie and showtime. It became so successful that new members had to wait weeks before they received their MoviePass cards. Maybe it was just too successful and sometimes all good things come to an end.
MoviePass will no longer allow new members to sign up for this type of unlimited plan. Instead, for $9.95 a month (3 months billed up front and then quarterly) members will only be able to see 4 movies a month and there are restrictions on seeing the same movie a second time according to a recent support ticket. This may be troublesome for some new members, especially if you see films with different groups of friends and expected to use MoviePass to see a movie again. Even more upsetting is that MoviePass is now asking for members to upload a copy of their ticket stub to verify they saw the movie and to prevent fraudulent activity. If you do not cooperate, that could be grounds for termination of your membership according to an article The Verge recently published.
There is no concern for members who signed up under the original unlimited plan at $9.95 a month (allowing you to see a movie every 24 hours) according to Tech Crunch. They recently reached out to a MoviePass spokesperson who confirmed “…this doesn’t affect any of the subscribers who signed up under the old plan.”
When The Hollywood Reporter asked CEO Mitch Lowe if the unlimited plan would ever return, he replied “I don’t know.” Furthermore, an independent auditor raised doubts about MoviePass being able to continue as a “going concern” based on financial documentation made publicly available by Helios & Matheson Analytics, the parent company of the subscription service according to Variety.
MoviePass is still a great value if you consider the price of an average movie ticket. In my region, a movie ticket costs on average at the matinee $11.95 and multiply that by 4 which comes out to $47.80. Another perk of MoviePass at most theaters is that you can still use it with your rewards card earning you points towards concession stand items and movie tickets. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.
