The Decline of MoviePass...What Happened? 

Shoutout to how moviepass seemingly, in an attempt to make profit, sent emails to those who cancelled their subscriptions, threatening to renew their sub without their permission if they didn't respond. That's illegal if you didn't know.

"One of the quickest rise and falls of all time" Quibi: "Hold my beer"

I just remember a guy on the radio going on about how great Movie Pass was, and he knew it wouldn't last so he went to a movie 5 days a week before they closed . I think he is the reason they failed.

Basically AMC was just sitting there litteraly eating popcorn watching the death of movie pass through their own ticket sales

This is literally a real life version of the Michael Scott Paper Company.

Lmao, he straight up started with "What a disaster"

I canceled when the app started to say " no more showing available today" i would get that message everyday, 6:00 am to close. I couldn't use the service most of the time.

When it came to canceling my movie pass, i would push cancel in the app, it would crash the app. i couldnt cancel, so i just reported my card as lost. it stop them from charging me.

It was very generous of those investors to buy all those free tickets for people.

WE WERE SO CLOSE TO HAVING A GOTTI CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

Why didn't they just say "$9.95 for the first month", then raise the price to something more reasonable, say, $25 per month from there on?

I unsubscribed when I was in the theater parking lot and my app wouldn’t load to get into mission impossible

You left out the shadiest parts of Moviepass’ tactics. They would suffer mysterious “outages” when really popular movies opened. This happened with _Mission Impossible: Fallout._ They would make deals with the studio behind one movie and shut out a movie opening on the same weekend (see _Death Wish_ and _Red Sparrow,_ respectively). Their strategy with the theater chains was to strong arm them into giving Moviepass a cut of the concessions, or else they’d stop sending customers to that chain, AMC just laughed at them, and Moviepass briefly stopped working at AMC theaters. That only served to piss off Moviepass customers.

I had the moviepass $100 for the whole year, one movie a day deal. During my calendar year, they started switching to the peak pricing model but they couldn't change my grandfathered in subscription because I had already paid. I went to about 15 movies a month. Moviepass eventually just shut off my service issued me a partial refund, $20 I think. So in the end I got like 9 months of movies (or about 135 movies) for $80. I took their $20 and signed up for my first month of AMC A-List, which I still have today.

The endgame??? He paid himself MILLIONS a year, he didn't care if it failed. A lot of these new start-ups do this, they take investors money, pay themselves first, and then the company goes broke, but they leave rich

I've only ever heard two people ever talk about Moviepass in my entire life. Brennan Lee Mulligan from Collegehumor in a skit about how poorly they were doing financially, and Company Man, in this video about how poorly they're doing financially.

Ah Moviepass. Good idea. Bad execution. The price couldn't be too high. But at 10 bucks it was always gonna fall. Their best chance at the end was to sell user data but they messed that up.

Their original price may have kept them in business, but 9.95 per month was too low.

Only 5 years until MoviePass is the most successful company out there

Got it for my brother, a film major, and he actually really appreciated the spirit of the company. He went on to actually limit the numbers of times he'd go to help them stop losing money but eventually... It wasn't worth the investment. It's worth mentioning I bought him the year long membership they were selling at Christmas time for $100 so they lost even more money on us.

I watched about 80 movies in 9months lol. I milked that cow till it ran red

I can't believe it lasted this long. The very first time I heard about it I knew that it was unsustainable.

I remember thinking the business model was insane when it first launched- I’m honestly amazed they made it this far.

I had movie pass and I think around when either endgame or Infinity war came out (I forget but I think IW?) they made it so that you cant use movie pass to see a movie a second time

I subscribed to moviepass in 2017 when they we're running a deal where you paid like 7 bucks a month if you paid for a whole year in advance. So I paid like 90 bucks and saw around 30 films before cancelling after a year. Literally saved me hundreds of dollars. I think Moviepass vastly underestimated people's love for movies, especially when they're essentially free.

You need to do the rise and fall of Loot Crate

There was something huge that they did that I think you either didnt mention or didn't know. In an effort to control what films people could see, only certain films at certain times where available for moviepass customers. And worse, this could change from day to day. The reason I cancelled my membership is one night I checked the app and saw a film listed in the AM that I wanted to see. I wake up that morning and get ready, and as I got in my car I double checked the app and saw the film was no longer available. Not just that time slot, but I couldn't see the film at all that day. I didn't want to plan my day around something else's schedule. Another reason they lost money, is people figured out how to load up their moviepass debit card with multiple films and then use it for snacks and drinks. Pretty smart if you ask me.

MoviePass: We'd like to come back. Hollywood: **laughs in 2020**

Maybe I'm just sick, but I love these kinds of episodes the most

When I first heard of it, I figured they must have had a deal with the theater, where the theater would give discounted tickets or moviepass would get a cut of the concessions sales or something; you know, the movie itself is a loss leader to drive other profitable sales inside the theater and they'd somehow share that in a win/win arrangement. But no, they were literally just throwing money away without a plan. How do these people get investors when an idiot like me can see the flaws?!

When amc introduced its own movie-pass style subscription service, i knew Moviepass was a goner.

As a film person (I work in the industry), I was so excited to try movie pass. I got it in the end of 2018 and didn’t even keep it for 2 months because it would always crash. But I did see some hella cheap movies for about a month. Now I’m an AMC stubs member and let me tell you, it is 1000x better. I pay $24.95 a month to see up to 3 movies a week and it is so worth it to me. I make sure to average 5 movies a month and love that I can go to the movies for basically $5. Also they give you a special online popcorn deal where it’s $10 for a large popcorn and large drink and unlimited refills. The amount of times I have gone with all of my friends and refilled that popcorn 3 times in one movie...

Moviepass saved me hundreds of dollars. And the breaking point was AMC stubs just being so much better

MoviePass was disaster, they say all good things must come to an end but MoviePass had to come to an end no matter what

When I first heard about Movie Pass, my thought was that I needed to buy a subscription while it lasts because it wasn’t going to last long. Thankfully, when it began to go out of business, I was able to get Regal Unlimited, which the only unfortunate part is that Regal is only the second best theater in town.

As someone who formerly worked at a movie theater in college... theaters have no control over ticket pricing. Theaters usually have strict agreements with movie studios about ticket pricing and percentages that they couldn't get out of even if they wanted to. If moviepass wanted to get bulk ticket pricing or whatever, it's the studios they needed to talk to.

I had Moviepass at its peak, and I saved a ton of money. Sometimes I was going to the movies 6 or more times a month, and at nice theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse. Last summer was the breaking point when there were so many restrictions placed that I could barely schedule a time to watch a movie I wanted to see. So it's been just about a year since I cancelled.

Oh MoviePass you idiotic company! I knew you couldn't last, but I thank you for all those free films in 2018!

They fell for the classic “growth = success” trap

"The quickest rise and fall of all time." That's call a bump.

AMC stubs membership is the way to go. I love mine.

I actually work at amc and at one point everyone had it now I don’t even see them at all, that’s crazy what happened. Welp now there’s a new program called the A-list lol

Some minor things you didn't get in the "History of MoviePass" section: 1) In late 2017/early 2018, they required subscribers to take a picture of their ticket as proof they attended. 2) They kept boomeranging on whether or not they allowed you to see a movie more than once. 3) Around June 2018, they added a huge restriction where you could literally only choose between two movies (which they chose) in a single day (rather than choosing from anything at a theater). This for me was the breaking point. However, I will point out they DID give me a partial refund for the unused portion of my annual subscription. I also want to add they said people with the annual subscription wouldn't be afflicted by subsequent changes, but this was completely false. While I never was subject to peak pricing, they still required me to take a pic of my ticket, and expected me to choose between two movies they chose.

Having seen this episode, this situation was remarkably similar to a recent Family Guy wherein Brian, Chris and Stewie needed to pay some fine for damaging a store, so they decided to run a fake Kickstarter campaign (the plan being they would pocket the money and claim they "ran into trouble" making the movie.) The plan worked better than they expected- they needed $3,000... and they got $1.5 million, and realized they actually had to *make* the film. I see that situation quite similar here, they initially used the lower price as a brief promotion to entice customers... but had to actually run it at that price when it became clear that was the *only* reason they got customers.

Holy crap what a dumpster fire. I would say that $9.99 thing will haunt whoever came up with it for the rest of their life, but it was probably some CEO who will just go into some other company and ruin it too.

When I had my Moviepass subscription it always in the back of my mind as I was using it once or twice a week “how much money are they losing on just me alone?”

I could be wrong, but my feeling was movie pass was trying to hold out until they got a big market share, say 50 to 100 million people. Once they had market share that big, they would go to one of the big theater chains and negotiate special pricing for tickets. You could even play theaters against each other, scaring one by telling them you were negotiating an exclusive deal with another big chain. Imagine being the CEO of AMC, with moviepass telling you if you don’t do a deal with them, you will loose 50 million customers to Regal. Eventually, one of the big chains would have cracked. Then everyone would have had to do a deal with movie pass or actually risk loosing a huge market share.

I remember when they announced the $9.95/month plan and I think I had an account before my friend could finish telling me about it. I was already seeing a movie around once a month, and my local theater charged $11 per ticket. So just by signing up I was saving money, but now I was seeing one every weekend at least since me and my girlfriend were essentially able to go on free dates. My breaking point was when the blackout dates or whatever they were called changed to be seemingly every showing except for noon on a Tuesday. At that point it just wasn't worth the hassle and I cancelled my account

“Everyone has been talking about moviepass for the past two years” I’ve literally never heard of it until now lmao

Cut my card when they sent me an email while I was swiping my card to pay for Mission Impossible Fallout. A third of my line had the same issue.

Can you do a vid on Thomas Cook? It was the oldest travel company in the world until this morning.

This was the best program ever for like $100 I got a year subscription and saw well over $1500 worth of movies before it died. After movie pass I started going to the theater more. So, movie pass did help the theaters. And since we got the subscription at Costco they couldn’t auto charge us and I think we even got a refund from Costco because the service died before our year was up.

You’re videos are always so great keep going dude !!!

They should of just made the price 39.99 with the first month free with a 12 month subscription. At 2.75 movies per person that would be a healthy profit per person. Easy!

I agree with whoever that has suggested Thomas Cook today, these events should definitely warrant a future video on it imo

I watched so many movies with my moviepass. I lived less than a mile from a theatre. The only drawback for me was that when the movies made it to HBO or Netflix I had already seen them and didn’t want to watch them again. There was nothing “new” to watch at home! Unless it’s something I’m dying to see- I found that I prefer watching a movie for the first time at home.

They grew way too fast then they could afford. And beacuse they were already losing money, it had a multiplier effect. Idk, maybe they should've start with small towns, start slow and then enter into growth mode.

The theatre makes their money back on concessions so it makes sense for the actual theatre companies to have this sort of service in-house. Even at $20 a month, I don't see how this could be profitable for MoviePass. I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that initial pricing.

Bro! This is the most lit channel on RU-vid! The Business Intelligence here can change your life!

I enjoyed it while it lasted and I abused the hell out of it.

4:23 Wait, so MoviePass just loses money if you use their service more than once a month and otherwise breaks even. *Stonks*

Wait for it...AMC will raise their price for their similar service.

I canceled when they limited the movies you could see

I remember back when they shorted the stock, I had invested into Helios like... a day or two before that. I made like $12,000 overnight, briefly, and then poof, gone.

I was an early adopter of Movie Pass when it was originally $35/month because I saw a movie each week on average. But right from the start there were all kinds of limitations that made it annoying like no IMAX or 3D and you had to buy your ticket at the theater the day of the show and you couldn't see a movie more than once. Sometimes I would say I was there to see one movie when I was actually going to see another in IMAX. But when assigned seating hit theaters, it was too much trouble to deal with. Even when the price dropped to $9.95 I didn't get it. But fortunately AMC expanded their Stubs membership to include A-List which resolved all of the issues I had with Movie Pass for just $19.95. I am so grateful that Movie Pass changed the system. Now my $800+/year habit (from before subscription services) is only $240/year!

NO ONE I have EVER known has talked to me about this thing or company...

I was a moviepass customer, and being a frequently financially struggling movie watcher, the 9.95 package seemed appealing to me; I usually spent 9$ a ticket but with moviepass I got to see more movies, I cancelled once the prices went up, since tickets were usually 9$ anyway it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth

Does the CEO also go by Mike? I thought it was Mitch. Great video! I signed up for Moviepass days after the announcement and saw 2-3 movies a month here in Kansas. With Moviepass struggling the last straw was two fold: when they still allowed for unlimited movies per month but restricted it to only being able to see the same movie once per month. This happened right before Infinity War last year so they knew what they were doing. Then A-List came out a short while longer and that was that.

The breaking point was when movies would be available on the app early in the day but then when you get to the theater they no longer show up on the app.

A company model to sell empty seats in the theatre would be interesting. Lets say you have a 10am showing of a film and the seats sell for $3 each at 9:45am with no subscription.

What you stated at the end is unbelievable to me. The fact that movie theaters were not already doing this on their own or at least not on a large scale.

I signed on when they started the $9.95/month "promotion." When they changed the model to three movies a month for $16, I cancelled my subscription. I realized that I rarely see more than three movies a month, and I couldn't rationalize paying for the increased subscription. It was also a pain in the butt to never be able to buy seats online in advance if I was going with friends.

Yeah it was a disaster, but I paid $90 for a card that allowed me to see 20+ movies in a three month span. Sad things took a sharp decline, but no complaints here.

I normally use the library for movies. It is a big wait, but it is free.

10:03 i noticed that the theatre looked familiar and i realized that it's the theatre in my town. cool to see it in a video! it's not a very large town.

Love watching your videos! You explain it in a way I understand, also have you done Mervyn’s?

most people don't go to the movies unless it's a movie they've been waiting for it to come out.

The Rise and Fall of Forever 21!

@CompanyMan I was an OG MoviePass customer when they first started at $35 per month, stuck with them when they raised to $45 and then they were gonna do a $55 and I dropped it. Probably had it for just under a year. Months and months later they dropped the $9.99 and I couldn't believe it. Signed up me and my gf immediately. There were customer service problems from day one. In the $35 days if you had a problem with the app they had a bunch of customer service reps who seemed to be working from home and were generally nice, relaxed seeming people probably getting paid a halfway decent hourly. They'd work with you to fix the issue. From what I understand they didn't do any additional hiring before they launched the $9.99 price point. So now their system is overloaded, there are a ton of issues (people not getting their moviepass cards for months after signup, double charges, repeated app crashes where I basically had to preform app store brain surgery everytime I wanted to see a film, so many issues) and absolutely no one from the company to assist. Eventually they added a chat feature to the app but sometimes youd start the chat and then the representative would finally get back to you hours to even days later. But whatever. For $10 I'll make it work myself. The whole time it felt like I was getting away with something that was obviously temporary. Common sense dictated that the other shoe would absolutely have to drop at some point Once they started changing the price points in ways that made it even more unusable I finally dropped it, it was after they did away with peak pricing but had all of these rules that made it unusable. At that point I was pretty resigned to the fact that I was definitely one of the people they wanted off of their service (Along with my gf I had a couple of buddies who used the service too so at my peak I was probably watching 8-12 movies a month, I really just love going to the movies). I did the math one day and tabulated that even taking into account the months when I was paying $35-$45 per month, I in total paid about $4.05 or so per film I watched w/ MoviePass, which especially considering I was living in NYC at the time, was pretty decent haul. So decent that I still feel a little guilty actually. Must have been a terrible company to work for. Thanks for the making this video!

"hello, and thank you for calling movie phone" -Comso Kramer

This was a really interesting video. I had never heard of movie pass

I’m taking a business elective because of you... I hope you’re happy

I still have my movie pass card. I even have the unusable app on my phone. Damn those were the days! I saw so many movies back in the day.

I'm from the UK and this is the first I've heard of Moviepass, it's strange hearing that it ushered in an era of cinema subscription passes bc we've had those over here for a lot longer than 2 years, such as the Odeon Premiere Club card, and a similar one by Cineworld

Moviepass was a scam all along, I knew their subscription was a joke, their unlimited plan had so much loopholes to prevent their users from seeing certain movies and they made it hard for people to cancel their subscription. It was like those old vinyl record clubs. Good riddance, they were shady!

It's to bad, I remember signing up as soon as I heard about the pricing, then 3 months later I unsubscribed because I realized I had seen the 2-3 movies I wanted to see and nothing new was coming out 🤷

Like you said, the best thing to come out of moviepass was AMC A-List Also during the fraction of a year well moviepass was fully functional I saw 1-2 movies a week. The college I was going to at the time was about 5 minutes from a big outlet mall with a regal theater in it, and my monday schedule had a 7 hour gap between classes. So every monday I would eat lunch, finish any work I had, and go see whatever movie was closest to starting when I got to the theater. Plus I would go every other weekend or so to see movies with friends. My "breaking point" was the second that they started having issues and werent letting people cancel. I swapped to AMC A-List, tricked moviepass into closing my account (since they were blocking people from canceling. seriously, everyone I knew and a bunch of people posting online all had the same issue where when you hit the "cancel" button at the end of the whole process they had in place the app would just crash. there was even speculation that they may have removed the functionality needed to cancel via the app) byt switching my card on file to the actual moviepass debit card. Since they only loaded that card when you booked a ticket their system bounced when trying to charge for the next month and so they closed me out after a few days. I still have that card and I still use it for that

Random but at minute 10:00 is that Regal Cinemas 14 in El Dorado Hills CA? I saw the picture and thought it looked very familiar, plus I also look up that same theater and they look identical idk but if you could respond that would be great lol

I mean, it's expected when they have so much focus on fast growth. Growth at that speed cannot be sustained without a lot of investment. My guess is that something similar might happen with Foodora, Delivery Hero and the such

I heard about Movie Pass but my local theater didn't accept it. I have AMC A -List.

So idk if you will even check this but I worked at AMC when the stubs premier program first rolled out. And I left shortly after moviepass folded. The entire time I was there, we were told to compare stubs to moviepass, with the intention to bury moviepass, instructions our management got from corporate. We were especially encouraged to sell the premiere membership to moviepass users, often told to help them cancel their moviepass at the counter. Wild times.

Hey you should figure out what happened to Thomas Cook Air

It was easy to tell it wouldn't last. We got the subscription, saw a TON of movies(which was great actually, I saw some stuff I wouldn't have spent the money on that I ended up loving), and we had it for quite a while. When they introduced peak pricing we considered dipping out, about a month later there was an issue with getting our tickets when we got to the theater. That's when we cancelled. Now we see movies almost exclusively at Alamo Drafthouse (They aren't a huge chain, but by far my favorite movie-going experience) They have a subscription model where you pay $20 a month for unlimited movies. We still see a ton of movies, but i'm sure the theater makes back the money they lose from tickets in the snacks, food, drinks, etc.

I hope they make a comeback one day. I enjoyed using it during the 3 movies a month era.

My friends had this and wondered what ever happened to it. Thanks.

Hi! Not what you asked, but I do have some knowledge about Movie Pass because I work for one of the largest Regal theaters that brings in over a million people a year. In short, we hated it. It was difficult to work with, the people with it expected us to understand what was going on, if the ticket cost over 15 dollars they had to cover the rest, they could only see certain movies by the end, and these issues would often clog up our lines and make service slower for everyone. We had an entire part of a quarterly meeting designated to telling us how to handle it, and signs in the back explaining how to tell people that we aren’t Moviepass, we can’t help them. We knew the nails were getting in the coffin when suddenly barely anyone was coming up to us with the cards, but hearing that it is for sure dead now gives me a sick sort of satisfaction. No more people yelling at me for getting their accounts flagged without knowing.

I sow this college humor and thought it was a funny skit. Never have i thought it was real.

Watching this in a time where I have to wear a face mask in a public place, even if everything worked, Moviepass was doomed.

This is an AWESOME video! Could you please do a "Hotwheels bigger than you know" video? This year is their 50th anniversary. Appreciate it!

Oh I remember, I was one of the first to subscribe, but a couple months after, when they started charging for peak, I canceled my subscription BUT, they were still charging my card, called twice to their useless customer service, they would say that I would get a call back when the situation was fixed, which of course it never was, tried going in the app to delete my card data BUT once you canceled you were locked out of your movie pass account BUT STILL GETTING CHARGED. Just a nightmare. Ended up calling the bank asking them to stop Movie Pass from taking money from the account.