After months of changes designed to keep the subscription service afloat but only served to piss off their dwindling base, MoviePass is finally going bye-bye tomorrow, September 14th.
It's been a turbulent couple of years since MoviePass really moved into the national spotlight by offering subscribers a monthly $9.99 all-you-can-watch plan. Moviegoers jumped at the offer, although it quickly exposed MoviePass' inability to find ways to profit from the model. Beginning in the summer of 2018, they experienced multiple service outages that denied subscribers from seeing the most popular movies. A series of changes to the plan alienated the most committed users by limiting the number of movies, and the quality of movies, they could use MoviePass on. The company also suffered a number of high-profile flops when attempting to become a direct distributor of movies. The less said about Gotti is probably for the better.
In recent weeks, MoviePass has continued to struggle. In July suffered yet another "temporary" shutdown. Large swaths of employees were let go, including those responsible for building partnerships with theatre exhibitors, a sure sign of rapid decline. As one final humiliation, MoviePass exposed many of its shrinking base's credit card numbers online.
So news of MoviePass' ultimate demise is not a shock, except that it took this long. The announcement was to subscribers by parent company Helios & Watson. Here's a little bit from the press release:
“On September 13, 2019, MoviePass notified its subscribers that it would be interrupting the MoviePass service for all its subscribers effective September 14, 2019, because its efforts to recapitalize MoviePass have not been successful to date."
Attempts will be made to find financing to keep MoviePass alive, but with no guarantees of a plan they will be forced to "explore all strategic and financial alternatives” which includes selling MoviePass off entirely, or its largest assets which include the once-popular Moviefone and the failed distributor MoviePass Films.
If MoviePass accomplished anything, it's proving that people still want to see movies in theaters on the big screen. They want that experience, it's just that MoviePass wasn't able to provide that for them and turn a profit. Independent distributor plans from AMC, Regal, and more seem to be ironing out the kinks and learning from MoviePass' mistakes.
