MoviePass - will it die a premature death or is it here to stay

https://www.yahoo.com/news/moviepass-reportedly-enrolls-past-subscribers-231051832.html

$126 million loss in the June quarter. Shareholder is filing a class action against them for, I guess, being bad at business. HMNY trading at $0.05 today.

https://deadline.com/2018/08/moviepass-hmny-shareholder-lawsuit-quarterly-loss-1202445563/

Has shareholders suing the company for being bad at business actually ever worked?

signed up for sinemia a few weeks ago but never got a physical card and the app is a nightmare. I'm just gonna cancel - not worth the fuss. Apparently I have to really hassle them to get my refund, too.

correction: they have informed me that sinemia plans are non-refundable even though they make you pay for a year upfront lol

BS, run a chargeback through your card.

Yeah, I'm looking into how to do that.

merchant disputes (I didn't get what I paid for!!! the quality is not what was promised!!) through CC chargeback probably easier than a dispute where you indicate you gave no authorization for the charge at all and the company does.

good luck!

sorry to hear that abt sinemia! that sucks.

moviepass is currently a near-absolute joke. and yet I just successfully used it to see madeline's madeline, somehow - apparently one of three or maybe four non-e-ticket offerings you can see today, anywhere. who knows what it'll be tomorrow? but still worth hanging onto my annual membership and seeing what happens. i have a shred of hope that they get their finances just slightly stable enough that i can rely on it to see repertory again. alas, the bygone days of just a few weeks back!

haven't yet walked into an amc and used my a-list, but i've advance reserved a couple of things and that was really really painless. if you're in a situation where AMCs show a reasonable portion of what you wanna see / what's even available in your area, it's a "pays for itself in 2-3 movies a month" kind of deal. in NYC it pays for itself in one IMAX screening. most of what i want to see doesn't play at AMCs, but a fair number of things do.

the newest new idea: a calendar listing specific movies available each day (obv no guarantees that specific showtimes of these will be available, or will remain available as the day wears on)

I was so shocked that Crazy Rich Asians was working today that I went ahead and saw it, so I guess their evil plan worked

it failed, as the goal of all this nonsense is to suppress use and reduce expenses. better luck next time!

if I'f known that BlacKkKlansman was going to be one of today's two available movies citywide, I wouldn't have paid for Christopher Robin and gone to BlacKkKlansman yesterday ;_;

The collapse broadens: Annual members are all being converted to the 3-a-month limit, less than three weeks after being promised that quarterly and annual plans would not be affected until their next billing date. Just to be extra dickish about it, they also counted anything you've already watched this month towards the 3-a-month total, so in my case I can't watch anything until 9/6 (because supposedly I started my annual plan on 8/6, which is, surprise, false - they weren't even offering them!). Man they're determined to go down pissing everybody off despite having enabled us all to see dozens of movies for a song, it's kind of amazing.

Literally what cash are they covering the remaining debits with at this point?

I've discovered an amazing hack to ensure they promptly cancel your subscription -- brazenly watch completely different movies than what is on the app.

They offered me a prorated cancellation for my annual then i went to do it and it said i wasn't eligible. Lol.

The funny thing is that ever since things started going to hell I've been assuming each movie might be my last. I kinda don't wanna go down with THE MEG as my last selection tho. Tried to snag a Suspiria ticket this AM (during that brief, early window before they ratchet down to only the day's crap selection of movies), but the theater's outdoor ticket kiosk was down :( If they weren't counting this month's prior viewings against my account, I'd have hope of seeing something kinda good before I finish, but as is it's probably smart to take the prorated refund and run since god knows they'll probably be out of business this time next week.....

xpost bahaha, well there you go then

oh btw as far as the thread question: it will die a premature death and is not here to stay

The collapse broadens: Annual members are all being converted to the 3-a-month limit, less than three weeks after being promised that quarterly and annual plans would not be affected until their next billing date.

ha, I bothered to email support about this yesterday, assuming that it was a glitch and that I could get my remaining five months of unlimited back, even though there's only three movies a month worth watching

then I signed up for Sinemia and they asked for an extra ten bucks to activate my account any sooner than two weeks

the other moviepassy shakedown

also, Neanderthal: posts on the reddit suggest that the "not eligible" refund response is a glitch and they're supposedly rolling out a fix. but if they don't you could consider reporting it with your CC for a chargeback (which the proferred refund is obviously intended to avoid, but if they're making it impossible to get the refund...).

on one hand i'm tempted to take the pro-rated refund. real bitter about them changing the annual sub to this extent

otoh i'm almost at the point where i want to punish this company for screwing with us every single week and just make them bleed money until my sub runs out

sic don't fall for the $10 "acceleration" fee, they'll just give up the ghost in two weeks and you can start then. they're shady too but probably a teensy bit more stable then MP at this point

the question for me is, with my 3-movie limit zeroed out retroactively until 9/6, will I even get the chance to fuck with them by buying 3 tickets in september? i assume by then you will have the choice of a single movie per day and only be able to buy it from 8 to 8:15 AM. they have looked closely at how best to serve their users and are excited to announce this new direction which they hope will enhance your moviepass experience!

still - $9.99 for 3 movies is a fine deal, they just need all the showtimes to work again

yeah exactly

they have to be so, so, so broke to hope that it will help them to go through with the pure customer-alienating stinginess of making the movie use retroactive. with one week left in the month even! obviously they lose money with every single movie you see so nothing surprising there exactly but man. like they couldn't have done the math three weeks ago when they sent the "don't worry, annual plan folks, you'll be fine!" I really hope someone gets access to their financials and can write a great, chernobyl-esque account of the deepening disaster. "by august 20 it was clear that this latest measure had backfired..." etc. i'm basically picturing their leadership as coked-up armie hammer in Sorry To Bother You, totally in denial of all possible criticism of the business model. maybe a little of rainn wilson in The Meg and rafe spall in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. thanks for the movies, #MoviePass!

sic don't fall for the $10 "acceleration" fee

ha ha no fear

there's just a bunch of stuff at the Cinerama I wanted to see this week and tickets are $18

(No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Stop Making Sense)

Sic I’ll be at the first two of those on Saturday! I paid full price though.

I will have to because it is in less than two weeks

what seat do you have for No Country? I'll try and get nearby, gonna skip full-price Blood prooobably (once I realised it's not 70mm)

Front row balcony on audience right side

lol doxxed

I wanted to try it while I was in town but no sense in signing up now. I get kind of mad reading about people being so trashy with their membership but whatever.

Trashy not here, but like, on that buzzfeed article.

i am baffled about why you would use it to use the bathroom

another fun wrinkle: the email states that if you stay on, you won't get charged for the monthly fee until your annual subscription would have been up for renewal anyway. fine. but the email also gets the date wrong ("...you began your annual subscription on August 6...." when actually i went over in december and got billed for it in january). good luck trying to get support to just confirm when your renewal date is in their system. they just copy and paste a bunch of stock stuff that they're feeding everybody who's coming at them today.

The stock is 2 cents. What do you think you'll get?

idk something saying "i've checked and your billing date is in our system as 1/4 now i gotta go i got a million other tickets" would really be fine for my purposes

So, if i buy a movie pass now, will that speed the death?

No, that will help them. It's once you start using it that you pound nails in the coffin.

What they should've done is sold day passes for multiplexes.

Or just not been total weirdos. I did buy 200 more shares at like 10 cents as a lottery ticket. I made money (from like $8 on it's run to 30something but then lost a little when I rebought in the lower teens).

AMC the new rally

Will miss hearing about jimmy pardo's podcast mate's weekend movie passathons

What they should've done is sold day passes for multiplexes.

fuck this, it’s been fun being able to catch wide-release things that look okayish, but it was more satisfying being able to use it on rep and arthouse and doco stuff for six months

^^^

agreed totally

I am talking about it from the business perspective and sustainability. I mean great that everyone got to tap the shit out of their moviepass for 6 months. It would be greater if the model could actually survive.

they're been around for years doing the slo-mo cash burn on a monthly membership model so i think abruptly shifting to a multiplex day pass (not sure i actually get what you mean by this or who it'd appeal to) might have just meant scrapping their existing userbase on a gamble.

I've prob posted this before, and every MP'er has their own little dream scenario, but I think the survivable version would have gone something like this: stay far, far away from the "1. drop price massively to grow subscriber base, 2. ???, 3. profit!" sequence. grow slowly and painstakingly as a multi-theater pass for cinema buffs, focused on NYC, LA, Chicago, and medium-size cities that have more than one indie theater. cut individual deals, theater by theater, for slight discounts on tickets in exchange for funneling in customers via e-ticketing. fuck the major chains, they will never cut you a deal so what's the point?

keep price high and limit service to a given number of movies per month, from the get-go. so you are getting a small but breaking-even type of movie-intensive subscriber base where the model is coupon books, not gym memberships (which was always insane). it needs to be "it's $50 and if I see all four movies a month I save eight bucks! if I go up to the $100 plan and see all eight movies a month I save twelve bucks!" or whatever. those are random numbers not scaled to anything but you get the idea. focus on the kind of person who really was seeing four small movies a month --- and then your little profit margin is that there's months when they're just busy or nothing's playing that they're interested in, and they only see one or two movies, and sure, on the side, cutting small deals with small films to push them in the app, not your GOTTIS but whatever is trying to be the next three identical strangers. put some dev time into basic "people who liked x also liked this movie we're pushing" algorithms. this isn't the main business but it can be a nice side line. if you get big enough, partner with your theaters to do moviepass exclusive events for small upcharges or stuff like that. it's a slow business of intensive phone calls and face to face meetings. it doesn't scale magically (you need to put in that time and energy city by city and if you're not ready to hire a new person, you can't expand into the southeast yet)... but it could actually be a functional, mildly profitable niche business.

yeah i'm pretty sure i've posted this whole thing before... sorry. just it seems like such a textbook case of how a splashy dot-com thing that imagines a whole new magic profit sector of the economy ends up ignoring both fundamental math, and an actually superior, long-term sustainable kind of business that just isn't as sexy. obviously these bozos all got paid and i got to see the movies and several of my favorite theaters got a whole bunch of math-challenged investors' money transferred to them so hey whatever.