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

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.

It was just an off the cuff suggestion. Basically, if moviepass has to pay out theaters $XX dollars for every ticket that is purchased on the app regardless of whether the person shows up maybe they should've had a price for one person to go to a cinema with numerous screens for one day. User can binge on multiple movies, stays longer to buy concessions, moviepass doesn't have to pay for every ticket at a massive loss.

yeah even at $35 or whatever the previous highest price point was, it was a great deal if you live in an American city, and an insane one if you live in NYC.

put some dev time into basic "people who liked x also liked this movie we're pushing" algorithms

their whole plan was to sell data to outside businesses, but they apparently never looked at any of their own data?

having given up and accepted the new terms (I never got an email offering me the prorated refund, and they bumped me off annual over a week ago), the app was actually working last night. so I saw The Happytime Murders at 11pm. can't believe this thing was basically in pre-production for a decade and they only wrote three jokes.

some people have been able to cancel, still doesn't work for me, reinstalled app still has server error, and that was the 'fix' they tried to get me to use.

oof...I should have at least 40% of it coming back too, cos they fucked up and charged me monthly for two months before they granted me annual and never refunded the monthly.

managed to actually use this thing last night. amazing. who knows if it'll happen again?!

have you not been able to use it for awhile?

I took a $25 refund at the end of August for the remaining 3 months of my annual plan. Probably what they wanted, but they wore me down with the ridiculous daily schedule that kept changing, making it impossible to plan ahead.
Might do A-List, right now just sticking with Sinemia for 3 tix/month.

it's just been too much of a hassle with the "movies of the day" system, and most of what i'm going to see not being on it etc. but finally checked off cameron post so hey

My annual cancellation didn't work and i had a ticket open that they failed to resolve and they tried to tell me the deadline passed

-_-

these fuckin guys

...this seems to be working again? Checked this morning and all theaters and all screenings were showing up?

there's a period every morning where every movie shows up. if you can get to the theater, and they're open or have an outside kiosk, you're good to go. they'll disappear by 8, or 9, or 9:30. this has been going on for ages.... speculation is that this is a feature, not a bug, letting them maintain claims somewhere in their marketing/terms that allude to seeing "any movie."

sinemia is now launching a $30/month unlimited plan - possibly plus little per-ticket processing fees, i'm not sure? that might be a better fit for me than AMC's deal since sinemia seems to cover a bunch of the NYC repertory etc options...

goddammit!

i think you can upgrade your plan!

i'm really tempted on this one

Moviepass withdrawal is realz

i think you can upgrade your plan!

I looked before posting and didn't see anything on their site that enabled upgrading. Totally down to if possible: just saw that the nearby arthouse which Moviepass dropped a few months ago has Reagan-era horror on Wednesdays in October/Nov and cat-related films by Marker, Mazurky, Shindo and Schrader on Saturdays in November. I haaaaaaate pre-buying online, even without the three-step complication of Sinemia, but it'll pay for itself quickly if I drop Moviepass altogether.

login to your account and go to "Extend Your Premium Membership"

i've read like three FAQs and i still don't think i understand how sinemia works. do you buy tickets within the sinemia app, or does it like, generate a one-time credit card number that you then use in fandango or whatever other booking app? i assume the latter because of people griping about paying the fandango convenience fees. but sinemia's own crappy web documentation doesn't talk about third-party booking at all. it also keeps referring to physical cards which afaict they aren't making anymore.

It's shady, no doubt. I'm only still on because I have a physical card from earlier in the year. Still, I haven't brought myself to getting A-List and forcing myself to drive an extra 20 minutes for all mainstream movies, so...

Here's how it goes:
1. You don't buy the tickets in the Sinemia app. You pick a showtime and theater. They give you a temporary one-time use credit card number.
2. You go to Fandango/Atom/the theater's website and buy using those credentials immediately. They will pay for the ticket cost, but you have to pay the convenience fee (usually $1.50-3) unless you can get them waived, which you can with certain theater chains or the Facebook workaround.
3. When you get to the theater, you check in with the app to prove you are there. They threaten to cancel your account if you don't do this.

Note - on the Elite plans, you can see as many 2D/3D movies as allowed by only one specialty screening (IMAX, 4DX, etc) every 30 days, regardless of your pay period dates.

I signed up to extend my membership to the 30-a-month plan, and it got screwed up and extended my current plan and billed me twice. Wonderful. Contacted them on Twitter to hopefully get it fixed.

that's exactly what I expected would happen if I clicked a button that says EXTEND YOUR [EXISTING] MEMBERSHIP!

yeah, but i've used the same button before to change plans.
plus, i got charged $$ for the new plan, even though i'm still on the old one