MoviePass: The trainwreck on its way to a complete derail

[Crowe Diddly]

Honestly there's still a market for this if done correctly, especially with the decline of people's willingness to spend $12+ in theaters.

no, that market is home-viewed HBO Max or netflix.

There's no theater that this works for, in any sense.

Most importantly, the entire premise of the lawsuit is that there NEVER was a market for this, and the moviepass people knew this the whole time. No "still," no "used to be," no nothing. It was trying to bargain price premium products. It was only even ever considered viable because of VC money assuring everyone it was a sure thing.

That was always the fatal flaw. People that buy movie tix via a season pass don't buy popcorn, coke, or nutterbutters. That became exceedingly clear during the first moviepass fiasco. Hell, that was a HUGE reason it failed. The movie theater profit is all add-ons, when its only a movie ticket purchase, the theater makes no profit, they're barely paying bills. When the rug-pull happens and now the movie is essentially free and nobody's buying the extras, the program works for nobody.

[Dan Druff]

Honestly there's still a market for this if done correctly, especially with the decline of people's willingness to spend $12+ in theaters.

no, that market is home-viewed HBO Max or netflix.

There's no theater that this works for, in any sense.

Most importantly, the entire premise of the lawsuit is that there NEVER was a market for this, and the moviepass people knew this the whole time. No "still," no "used to be," no nothing. It was trying to bargain price premium products. It was only even ever considered viable because of VC money assuring everyone it was a sure thing.

That was always the fatal flaw. People that buy movie tix via a season pass don't buy popcorn, coke, or nutterbutters. That became exceedingly clear during the first moviepass fiasco. Hell, that was a HUGE reason it failed. The movie theater profit is all add-ons, when its only a movie ticket purchase, the theater makes no profit, they're barely paying bills. When the rug-pull happens and now the movie is essentially free and nobody's buying the extras, the program works for nobody.

If you go back and read my OP you will see what I meant.

The way this whole thing was structured, I agree it was guaranteed to fail. The concession thing was lol for the reason you stated, as well as the fact that it's difficult to convince casinos to give up a portion of that revenue.

The full reimbursement of theaters for the tickets bought was the most insane part. That had zero chance of being anything but a gigantic loss for the company.

The winning formula would have been to simply contract with theaters to reimburse them for a small fraction of the ticket cost, but limit it to pahticipating theaters and to agreed upon off-peak hours, perhaps with blackouts for certain high profile new releases for the first week. Perhaps they also could have struck some concessions deal where people with the pass could also get 25% off on those, and it might spur those cheapskates to buy something.

Theaters shoulder very little extra cost to have additional people in seats. It costs almost the same to screen a film for a packed house than for two people in the entire theater, yet the amount of revenue (both from tickets and concessions) is tremendously different. More butts in seats -- even at a reduced rate -- is free $ in their pockets.

It's a similar concept to those old theaters which used to only screen 3-month-old movies, and then you'd get in for like $2-$3. I remember that's how I ended up being dragged to "Fried Green Tomatoes" with my then-girlfriend in 1992.

This business made the huge mistake of starting out with a guaranteed huge expense (covering these movie tickets purchased, at full price), and then hoping to somehow make it up with pie-in-the-sky revenue stream ideas. Then apparently they got into fraud when the stock price went into the toilet.