MoviePass Has Lost Over 90% of Its Subscribers in Less Than a Year, Leaked Documents Reveal

MoviePass users apparently hit the exits en masse after it scaled back the number of movies users could see each month. From a report: The flailing cinema-subscription provider has seen its subscriber rolls plunge from a peak of more than 3 million to just 225,000 in under a year, according to a new report. The numbers were reported by Business Insider, which cited "internal data" it had obtained. Asked for comment, a MoviePass spokeswoman declined to confirm the subscriber figure. In June 2018, MoviePass claimed it had signed up more than 3 million subscribers for its $9.95 monthly plan, which let customers see one movie every single day. But that proved unsustainable, and MoviePass was forced to change that to a three-movies-per-month plan. In August 2018, MoviePass began to convert subscribers on annual subscription plans to the three-movies-per-month subscription plan, by giving annual subscribers the option to either cancel or refund their annual subscription or continue on the new three-movies-per-month subscription plan.

Give stuff away

[tomhath]

Lose money on every transaction, but make it up in volume. Where have we heard that before?

Re:Give stuff away

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Works for a lot of companies, who then make it up via data sales and ads. See FB, Google, etc.

Re:Give stuff away

[rogoshen1]

or "How to soak up as much money from VC's as possible"

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

There's no reason why "selling products" matters. The each have a cost per user. MoviePass planned to lower their cost (through negotiations with the theater) eventually. And, you know, with 100's of millions in start up capital it may have worked. Or not. But it would be (was?) expensive to find out.

Don't forget Amazon!

[Shane_Optima]

People forget that Amazon was bleeding money for years and years and years before they finally crept into the black.

Granted, this business model seemed suicidally optimistic, almost as bad as Kozmo.com (free delivery of, um, almost every that you could get in city limits. In under an hour), but Amazon's free 2 day shipping for anything $25 and up (something they offered for years before Prime showed up) also seemed too way good to be true when it first appeared.

Ditto Netflix's amazing catalog of onl

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I almost listed Amazon, but IIRC, they still made money on every sale. It was the overhead that killed them early on.

Re:

[omnichad]

I believe that was called Web 2.0.

Re:

[Opportunist]

I thought 2.0 was the advent of "you make the content, I make the money"?

Re:

[omnichad]

Which never made money on the small scale. A lot of it wasn't monetized for years after it was created. The goal at the time was to make things as big and widely used as possible and somehow the volume would make money.

Admittedly, this isn't the traditional "make it up in volume" but it still seemed to be the thinking.

What is MoviePass?

[fbobraga]

... never had heard of it

Re:

[CaseCrash]

So I guess you don't actually read slashdot? Because there have been over 20 stories about it [google.com] here.

But don't worry, we all think your proclaimed ignorance is super cool.

Re:

[fbobraga]

I'm really not a "intensive" reader here...

Re:

[CaseCrash]

Yeah, he's got 93 pages of comments on his profile.

Re:

[Shane_Optima]

Same thing I said when I heard someone say that they really missed Kozmo [wikipedia.org].

Seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

A movie ticket costs me on average 10-12 bucks. If I went to the movies regularly, getting 3 shows for 10 dollars still sounds like a pretty fantastic deal. The fact that 90% of their customers quit means they were all going to the theater an absurd amount of times, or they were doing something fishy like reselling seats. I don't know how the company ever planned to make a profit off this scheme, but it does clearly show there's a demand for this that film studios could capitalize on if they weren't so shor

Re: Seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

People asked for a refund when they switched to the 3 movies a month deal.

It seems, lying to people and telling them they can see a movie a day, then doubling back after they already signed up and say "we changed our minds, here's 3 movies a month tho" doesn't work out to good.

Customers did the right thing, voting with their wallets. Period.

Re:

[misnohmer]

Evidently "a lot of movie goers to whom this is reasonable" consists of 225,000 people, which is only 10% of the people who subscribed initially.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

By that time Movie Pass had become synonymous with Titanic, Hindenburg, and Deepwater Horizon. Everyone bailed the sinking ship except for the small minority of folks who weren't actually using their subscriptions and felt the 3 movies a month was still a great deal.

Re: Seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the 3 movies a day bit wasn't terrible. It was when they started only allocating a certain number of seats for specific movies that it went off the rails.

I had planned to see Ant Man and the Wasp with some friends. Checked the app, went to dinner down the street, and then when I went to buy the ticket (you had to be 100 ft from the theatre) suddenly the movie was no longer available. Ended up having to pay cash. Great movie but the experience really pissed me off.

Then I swear for 2 solid months all

Re:

[That YouTube Guy]

A premium movie ticket (Dolby/IMAX) is $20 in Silicon Valley. I pay only $20 per month for AMC's A-List program to see three movies per week. Since I live six miles from three AMC theaters, I have a lot of viewing options. Since I joined the program last year, I've seen a movie just about every week. The only time I saw three moives in a week was during a three-day holiday. AMC makes their money back on concessions since everyone drinks and eat during the movies.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Seems fair

[Paxtez]

The problem was less about the limited number of movies you can watch. The app / service didn't work anymore. So in addition to the fewer movies they changed how it worked:
- Needed to submit a photo of a movie stub after (totally reasonable)
- Each day there was 4 or 5 movies you could see with the app.
- 3-4 of the allowed movies were art house movies that were never playing at any of my local theaters
- They only allowed X number of tickets to be sold during the day otherwise you got a "no more movies" at ea

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[mea_culpa]

That, and there really hasn't been anything worth going to the cinema in a while. 90% of the movies that came out seem to me no better than Netflix quality. Might as well wait for it to roll on Netflix later.

  I can't be the only one noticing this.

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[rally2xs]

"Absurd amount of time." Right. I see almost everything. Retired, love moviegoing experience. Seeing a movie in the theater is about 5X as enjoyable as seeing it at home. All sorts of reasons, but I like to go to the theater, that's the bottom line.

I got back several times what I spent on MoviePass when I bought the yearly subscription. They finally "turned off" my access about 7 months in, but too late, I already had raided their coffers for an egregious amount of movie ticket money.

And since they

Re:

[omnichad]

It's more like a gym membership than insurance. Otherwise, more or less the same principle.

Re:

[omnichad]

Except unlike a gym membership, the gym controls costs

I strongly disagree. A lot of gyms have low fees because they count on a large percentage of their members not showing up regularly. If everyone used their membership, they would not be able to handle or afford the volume.

Re:

[misnohmer]

Hey, maybe Movie Pass should have bundled a gym membership with the move pass. Require an hour workout for every movie you see, pure profit!

You sell one thing but wind up delivering another

[Crashmarik]

Yeah that will happen. Customers are funny that way.

This just in...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

If you build your business on unsustainable fantastic deals, don't be surprised if it evaporates when you stop offering those deals.

Downgrade

[Livius]

Maybe the new plan was more logical in some way, but downgrading your service from 31 per month to 3 per month is a massive change to implement unilaterally. If I had one I'd cancel my subscription just on principle.

Re:

[Miamicanes]

The REAL reason everyone left wasn't because they cut the number of movies down to three per month. Everyone left because they made seeing those three movies more trouble than it was worth.

MoviePass didn't adopt the 'gym' business model... they adopted the 'HMO' business model of throwing delays and barriers at people in the hope that they'll give up instead of using the service. The thing is, people might grudgingly endure that with healthcare if they have absolutely no alternative (even if it's to their u

Re:

[geoscodin]

On more than one occasion, I noticed that my Android app would tell me a type of movie was not available even though my friend with an Apple app said it was, so we would switch to a new movie and both get in fine. Once they started monkeying with the rules, it constantly told me there were no movies available. That was when I quit and switched to A-List.

no surprise here

[renegade600]

however, I am surprised it was only 90%. their bait and switch tactics is what did it. then telling members they can quit and still charging credit cards by changing the way members unsubscribe after the fact. they just can't be trusted!

There's more to it

[SmaryJerry]

They changed their policies so much I can't even remember all of the different limits. Things they did included, making it so you couldn't watch the same movie more than once, raising their prices then lowering them again, reducing the amount of movies you could watch to 3, not making hit movies available for weeks after they come out, limiting which showtimes you could see, not making 3D movies available, and there are probably more I can't remember. What really killed it was limiting what movies you could see, so you basically you were at their mercy to what movies you could see which often was none of the blockbusters.

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[mentil]

"I've altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further."

Apparently 90% of customers ran out of faith.

surcharges

[Layth]

you missed the biggest one that drove me away. instead of movies being free they stared charging like $7-$8 to see a movie. it became totally pointless to subscribe. Pay them a monthly fee, then pay again when you see a movie, additionally with out certain showtimes being available. MP was complete shit lol. Funniest moment for me was when they disabled the unsubscribe button on their app. they made it impossible to unsubscribe at one point while they figured out their next move lol

10% stayed !

[bugs2squash]

So was this the game plan all along. Sign up 3M, switch the terms of service so that anyone paying attention left, and keep the 300k people who forgot they even have membership and just pay the bill blindly each month / never go to a movie ?

Re:

[qubezz]

The business plan was complete garbage, you would be better investing your VC in a literal dumpster fire. They were buying the tickets outright with little discount, and what they hoped to monetize was the info they would scrape out of your phone and your GPS data with the mandatory app.