Not so long ago I brought you a story about the Subscription Movie service that allows you to see a movie a day, every day, for $9.95 a month.
It sounded like an unsustainable model, and it turns out, it was.
That's not my screen grab, that is one that came from a facebook group. But people have been experiencing this all over the place over the last few days.
In fact, on Thursday, MoviePass ran out of money and had to take an emergency $5 million loan in order to pay for the tickets people were trying to get. They then determined that they would not allow subscribers to see Mission Impossible over the weekend, and today, no screenings available, for any movie, at any theatre. The one exception is e-ticket cinemas which have a partnership with Moviepass.
The problem is, the other Cinemas did not have agreements with Moviepass. They were buying the tickets from the theatre at full price. Taking a loss in order to collect our consumer data. They are a research and analytics company after all.
Well when you have 3 million people seeing movies and you are paying more for each ticket than the monthly fee in a lot of cases, things are bound to go wrong.
In an effort to stem the tide, Moviepass has restricted subscribers from seeing the newest of new releases the next couple of weeks. They also have introduced "surge pricing" asking subscribers to pay a premium for seeing movies in the first weekend or weekends.
Will Moviepass manage to recover? Will a different service rise in it's place with a more lucrative business model? Who can tell. For now, those of us with Moviepass cards just have to sit and wait.
