Moviepass on Life Support

First off I want to give a big thank you to Moviepass . Thanks to you its been a terrific summer at the movies. I have seen everything I could stomach to sit through. Yes I even saw Oceans 8. Going through my history in the Moviepass app I checked in and saw 52 movies since I signed up in March. It was a test just to write an article and I fell in love with watching movies in the theater again. I even found myself going out of my way to visit the towns older theaters that I used to frequent as a child just for nostalgia purposes. I can truly say it was a great summer at the movies thanks to movie pass.

52 movies in 5 months, at an avg. ticket price of $10 Moviepass paid $520 for me so far and I only shelled out $50 for the 5 month subscription. That is probably why Moviepass is on life support right now. We have seen the stock verse split in the past week for a 1:250 reverse, Only to watch that crash again. Shutdowns, crashes and failures on the user end. We are watching the deep a dying breath of Moviepass.

Is it time to give up? Cancel my subscription? Go back to paying for each movie I want to see? Not a chance, like it or not Moviepass has changed things. There is no going back and theater subscriptions are the business model of the future. The industry was taking a down turn for the first time in a 100 years and Moviepass breathed new life back in to it. THey will have to pry my Moviepass card from my cold dying hands…

Is There Any Hope?

While it is looking very dark and there seems to be no chance of pulling out of this nose dive they are in now Moviepass is still clinging to life. They have been working on a cash shortage situation and a way to make this subscription turn a profit. They have in emergency fashion cut a lot of the options from the app. You can no longer see new release movies and some Movie times are just not available. They are in the process of raising the price to $14.95 monthly. I did a quick rundown on the math, with my usage its still highly advantageous for me. $74.95 for $520 worth of movie visits.

The only way this can work is if the theaters and studios start to see the impact Moviepass has had and can start using Moviepass to their advantage making it worth wild to subsidize the ticket cost for them. The price will obviously have to increase. $19.95 would be optimal if they can find a way to even make that profitable. Another option is to use the app to show movie trailers and gaining user interest through there. Have the app play an Ad for a trailer of an upcoming movie upon checking in to the app. Maybe even a 1-5 rating question of how likely are you to see this movie. Giving valuable user input of 5 million subscribers could be a nice barging chip for them.

The Final Moviepass Thought

I’m all in on Moviepass and I’m really hoping it finds a way through this organizational pivot. Pivot they must, but I keep going back to the early days of Netflix when they disrupted the video rental industry.” They don’t charge late fees and the expense of using the mail system will break them”, on pivot and here we are. Hold strong movie pass, and for all of you debating on whether to cancel your subscription, stay tuned for my next article “ 5 reasons to keep Moviepass this fall”