> There are a lot of ways to read that percentage, and in MoviePass’ defense, the company has also said that the goal was to prevent people from using MoviePass to buy tickets for friends who aren’t subscribers. But either way, a savings of more than a third represents a radical shift. Couple that with the fact that the most popular movie the first week of May was Avengers: Infinity War, whose astounding box-office performance is driven by repeat visits, and the connection seems clearer — MoviePass is openly trying to save money by limiting features its customers actively use. It isn’t a “test” or an “experiment,” as the company has claimed in the past; it’s intentionally making the subscriptions people have already paid for less useful because its business model is unsustainable.
Getting rid of repeats saving 35% seems to point to some pretty widespread abuse. Who are these people seeing the same movie multiple times during its initial theater run?
My wife, a Moviepass subscriber, has been to the movies some 60 times since December. She typically goes 30-40 times a year, it's one of her and her friends' favorite hobbies. You might go to coffee or the bar, I might go to the park or the gym, she and her friends love going to the movies. It's just a thing to do for a couple hours on a weeknight.
There was no 'abuse' in the sense of sharing her pass among friends, or buying tickets and not going to the movie. She does like a frozen coke sith her movie, and she buys the $35 free refill popcorn bucket 3 times a year, so there was quite a bit of profit for the theater, but she was not profitable to Moviepass and they might feel that normal use for her was abuse.
She would not be profitable unless (a) Moviepass can negotiate <50-cent tickets with the theater with kickbacks for concessions, or (b) she convinced enough people close to her (like me) to buy a moviepass and buy fewer tickets than the subscription costs.
The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would have spent more on tickets than moviepass.
This is the crux of the problem, I think. People who see one movie a month are not going to buy it. So they need to be profitable for high-usage customers. Unless they are getting incredible discounts... just not going to work.
For it to make sense, there need to be some restrictions -- e.g., only Sunday through Thursday nights (times when fewer people go to the movies... whatever they might be). But then a lot of people like me, who are too busy to go at that time, will skip it.
If you want me to over-pay for an option, it needs to have some intangible value. For example, if buying a moviepass gave me X times a month that someone else could come "free"... I might value that above market cost, because I could tell others "don't sweat it, it's free" and get friends to come along without feeling I'm pressuring them to spend a lot of money.
It's not possible to draw conclusions about how many people were "abusing" the service without a lot more information.
You must be very unfamiliar with modern movie audiences, especially comic book movie fans. Plenty of people see movies they're fans of multiple times after release.
It appears from comments below that you personally don't like watching the same movie over again. Other people, however, do. Your personal bias is skewing your ability to understand the situation.
What's actually going on is that the service customers have paid for is being reduced while the price hasn't changed, screwing the customers.
> ... whose astounding box-office performance is driven by repeat visits
I think you underestimate how often people will see the same movie.
Getting tickets for your friends for MoviePass is a whole separate issue (and clearly abuse). But is seeing the same movie more than once "abuse"? That's more debatable. But repeat viewings clearly happen.
A lot of services depend on individual usage staying in certain bounds, and which would rarely be exceeded by the typical, intended usage; but where the provider doesn't want to commit to a hard cap (cough ISPs, Github). These services would collapse if everyone started re-selling the good, because it vastly changes the use profile. The term "abuse" is understandable (if not always warranted).
But you're right: one individual seeing the movie more than once is not inherently "abusive", even in that sense. But reselling is, for sure: the typical user is not going to see a movie every day, and the MoviePass model is based on such a "gentlemen's agreement", where people won't go out of their way to use every day's ticket (except the rare oddball user).
As a way to root out actual abuse, they have to use some crude heuristics, and one of them is repeat movie viewings. Yes, some honest non-resellers see movies more than once, but the most common case is this kind of reselling.
I just logged into MP last weekend and there was a pop-up reminding us that accounts were not to be shared in addition to the new, "you can only see a movie once" rule. Total speculation, but my guess is that a good chunk of that was people sharing accounts.
That said, I love MoviePass but know it's not sustainable. I wish they had rolled out these changes earlier. Something like no repeat viewings, 8 movies per month, different price depending on where you live (tickets at my theater are only $9 normally), etc, could have made this thing much more sustainable, and still probably had most of the growth.
Abuse is likely a big factor but there are likely some honest actors in there too.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were people (especially those that buy MoviePass, I'd expect them to be movie fans) that see big blockbusters two or three times. But yeah at 35% savings that's gotta be largely abuse.
(cut me some slack in 1999 Star Wars had a ton of goodwill and excitement built up, we couldn't know what the Prequel Era would end up being :)
The reason why the model works for Pathé and not for MoviePass is because of 2 reasons:
- Pathé owns their own theaters, so they can run the subscription program at a loss, but make the money back with condiments sales because of the increased flow of visitors
- Pathé owns the most theaters in NL, there’s always one closeby. The subscription program is usable by the majority of the population because of physical proximity.
So for this to work in the US, the big chains basically need to offer this themselves. I hope that Cinemark will learn from MoviePass’s validation of the market (clearly there’s a huge demand) and undercut them by offering their own program. #lastmoveradvantage
s/condiments/confections
Cineworld cinemas in the UK do a very similar offer, and again it costs roughly 20 Euros.
MoviePass pricing has always reminded me of the old adage, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.", especially when you consider they are paying full face value, which none of the European competitors I'm familiar with do, as they typically run both the subscription service and the cinemas themselves.
The more pressing question to me is why hasn't a large cinema chain in the US tried this model, when it is clearly working in many other foreign markets?
Now they have to convince their customers to use the service less, while trying to increase the number of subscribers they get reoccurring revenue from .
That's an almost sisyphean task.
Even harder will be convincing one of the chains to buy them.
I'm guessing that if we don't see an announcement of a sale to one of the movie theater chains in the next week they'll end up bankrupt and one of hte major theater chains will by at least their data at that point.
How do you go about convincing a company to buy you when they know that you'll be there in bankruptcy court to buy at a cheaper price.
I wonder if theaters have figured this is a waiting game and they can just let MoviePass die and go back to business as usual...
I found out in the lobby of the AMC, bought my own damn ticket, and mulled over cancelling Moviepass for two weeks. AMC didn't blink, though, so those theaters were re-enabled right before I was about to switch to Sinemia.
> On Thursday, MoviePass shaved 10 of the busiest AMC locations off its app in an effort to take a hard position against the nation’s largest movie theater chain. MoviePass is seeking a $3 cut on AMC tickets that it covers, plus 20% of concessions given the foot traffic it sends to AMC (a total estimated at about $2 million a week, per MoviePass insiders).
I believe further analysis showed that the "$2 million a week" was ridiculously inflated.
This is a long-term, Amazon-style play: burning capital up front to establish a commanding market position, at which point you can start raking it in by charging monopolist rents. But it assumes you can build a big enough user base to start dictating terms before you run out of capital, and if you can't, the whole thing falls apart pretty quickly.
As an amateur stock picker, I've been on the sidelines watching the back and forth commentary on this company (Helios and Matheson) and MoviePass since it was (I believe) in the 30's.
It seemed like everyone knew from the get go that the model wasn't going to turn a profit, but they were hoping for some of the other stuff to generate a return somehow (the information being valuable).
The stock price partially is because a Netflix co-founder is behind the company. However, part of me wonders whether it was a pump-and-dump scheme.
I still have it, but I consider it an aspirational purchase for a time when I can actually go to movies. I think I'm averaging about 2 movies for every 3 months.
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/18/17025372/transcript-moviepa...
Before the price drop they were taking in about $1 million/month (20,000 subs at $50). They're over ~2~ 4 million subscribers now at $10/month.
If they have even a 5% retention rate they'll have increased their revenue to $2 million/month.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/01/technology/classpass-credit-...
Uber is getting support from everyone to subsidize the cost of rides. And the ploy is to wait until self-driving cars are viable. I guess the market is saying that movie theater chains can hold out against bargaining for longer than that.
If I go twice in a month I can skip a month and not feel bad.
I don't buy concessions though, so theres no money to be made there.
Only being able to see a feature film once, not something I am entirely happy about because I'd have liked to see the new Avengers twice, but I can live with it. It does allow me to go to a movie I wouldn't usually see just because it's "free".
I'm just sad I didn't sign up to blow through some of that sweet, sweet free VC money myself.
If you expected it to fail, it seems that going month to month would have been a better plan than expecting a third party to eat a loss at your gain.
I love you MoviePass, but you are not bright.