?????
Movie News: MoviePass Now $7.95 w/ Free Fandor UPDATE: Almost GONE! It's BACK SEC LAWSUIT! Documentary!
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
?????
Welp, they're jacking the price to $14.99 a month. I'm about to cancel my subscription and try this one...
https://www.sinemia.com/
https://www.sinemia.com/
Here on BGOL there was a thread that said that it was cofounded by a brother.
A week month later his company isn't worth shit.
Thought it was strange
Here on BGOL there was a thread that said that it was cofounded by a brother.
A week month later his company isn't worth shit.
Thought it was strange
I am not sure that is accurate.
MoviePass is black owned?
I aint gonna say you wrong.
Wow
How are they raising the price and having blackouts
Damn bruh, BGOL always in the front of everything that I happen to miss good shit like this. I only got MoviePass this summer to see Infinity Wars.
and having peak pricing
Said they were going to do like $2 to $6, but that shit was $8 I went ahead and joined A List, that way I can see Sorry To Bother You or Blindspotting again since shit nothing is coming out this weekend
It was enjoyable, it was a typical blockbuster. Shit I liked it better than Rampage and Jurassic World.
I concur. Jurassic world was disappointing, as was Rampageand having peak pricing
I went ahead and joined A List, that way I can see Sorry To Bother You or Blindspotting again since shit nothing is coming out this weekend
It was enjoyable, it was a typical blockbuster. Shit I liked it better than Rampage and Jurassic World.
MoviePass Cancels Its Yearly Subscription Option, Switches Everyone to Monthly Plan
https://www.bgol.us/forum/threads/m...on-switches-everyone-to-monthly-plan.1015371/
https://www.bgol.us/forum/threads/m...on-switches-everyone-to-monthly-plan.1015371/
MoviePass’s Garbage Summer Continues With Terrible User Feedback
By Chris Lee
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
It’s been a cruel summer for MoviePass. Over the past few weeks, the embattled movie-ticket subscription service has been jolted by one distressing development after another. Users became livid when the company raised its price from $9.95 to $14.95 a month, implemented surge pricing, and began limiting attendance to first-run films. (A subscription now costs $9.95 but limits users to three films a month). Amid frequent service outages, MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, had to take out an emergency $5 million cash loan last month to keep operations running. Helios stock fell from $20 to just two cents a share on Monday and faces being delisted on Nasdaq, making MoviePass’s prospects of staying financially afloat even more dicey.
Now, adding insult to injury, a new poll indicates the number of MoviePass subscribers who are “very satisfied” with the service has plummeted to just 48 percent — down from an 83 percent satisfaction rate earlier this spring. Moreover, according to the poll by the entertainment strategy and polling firm National Research Group, 47 percent indicated they are at least “somewhat likely” to cancel the service thanks to the recent changes. “MoviePass’s innovation was offering the freedom and flexibility to see any movie, at any time, almost any theater, for a low price,” Jon Penn, chief executive of NRG, said in a statement. “By constantly changing the terms of the service — limiting which film subscribers could see and when they could see them — MoviePass has eroded brand trust and undermined their leadership position.”
in March that expressed general subscriber happiness with the service — and how it had fundamentally reconfigured the way people see movies in theaters — even while reflecting users’ doubt that MoviePass would remain in business.
Other key findings from the new NRG poll:
* Only 37 percent of subscribers said they planned to remain subscribed “for a long time,” with the top two reasons for cancellation being: “They kept changing the rules” and “I couldn’t see the movie I wanted when I wanted to see it.”
* Of the recent cancellations, 50 percent of the former subscribers canceled in the month prior to taking the survey. And 50 percent of lapsed subscribers say they are going to the movies less often now.
* In March, 32 percent of responders thought MoviePass “wouldn’t last”; that number has now shot up to 50 percent.
By Chris Lee
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
It’s been a cruel summer for MoviePass. Over the past few weeks, the embattled movie-ticket subscription service has been jolted by one distressing development after another. Users became livid when the company raised its price from $9.95 to $14.95 a month, implemented surge pricing, and began limiting attendance to first-run films. (A subscription now costs $9.95 but limits users to three films a month). Amid frequent service outages, MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, had to take out an emergency $5 million cash loan last month to keep operations running. Helios stock fell from $20 to just two cents a share on Monday and faces being delisted on Nasdaq, making MoviePass’s prospects of staying financially afloat even more dicey.
Now, adding insult to injury, a new poll indicates the number of MoviePass subscribers who are “very satisfied” with the service has plummeted to just 48 percent — down from an 83 percent satisfaction rate earlier this spring. Moreover, according to the poll by the entertainment strategy and polling firm National Research Group, 47 percent indicated they are at least “somewhat likely” to cancel the service thanks to the recent changes. “MoviePass’s innovation was offering the freedom and flexibility to see any movie, at any time, almost any theater, for a low price,” Jon Penn, chief executive of NRG, said in a statement. “By constantly changing the terms of the service — limiting which film subscribers could see and when they could see them — MoviePass has eroded brand trust and undermined their leadership position.”
in March that expressed general subscriber happiness with the service — and how it had fundamentally reconfigured the way people see movies in theaters — even while reflecting users’ doubt that MoviePass would remain in business.
Other key findings from the new NRG poll:
* Only 37 percent of subscribers said they planned to remain subscribed “for a long time,” with the top two reasons for cancellation being: “They kept changing the rules” and “I couldn’t see the movie I wanted when I wanted to see it.”
* Of the recent cancellations, 50 percent of the former subscribers canceled in the month prior to taking the survey. And 50 percent of lapsed subscribers say they are going to the movies less often now.
* In March, 32 percent of responders thought MoviePass “wouldn’t last”; that number has now shot up to 50 percent.
MoviePass Server Breach Is the Latest Example of How It Plays Fast and Loose With User Data
By Chris Lee
Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
MoviePass just keeps shooting itself in the foot. On Wednesday, the beleaguered movie-ticketing subscription service confirmed that a security breach may have exposed tens of thousands of customers’ records online, where they may have remained unencrypted since early May. That information is alleged to include MoviePass card numbers and personal credit data including names, addresses, and card expiry dates — in other words, the building blocks for fraudulent financial transactions — all thanks to a lapse in password protection on a critical subdomain server.
“MoviePass recently discovered a security vulnerability that may have exposed customer records. After discovering the vulnerability, we immediately secured our systems to prevent further exposure and to mitigate the potential impact of this system,” chief executive Mitch Lowe said in a statement. “MoviePass takes this incident seriously and is dedicated to protecting our subscribers’ information. We are working diligently to investigate the scope of this incident and its potential impact on our subscribers. Once we gain a full understanding of the incident, we will promptly notify any affected subscribers snd the appropriate regulators or law enforcement.”
The announcement arrives as the latest self-inflicted calamity for the so-called Netflix of movies, which has remained in financial free fall for the better part of the past 17 months and has seen its goal of disrupting the theatrical-moviegoing business grow ever more remote. Dwindling from a user base of more than 3 million last year, MoviePass reportedly now boasts fewer than 225,000 subscribers.
Worse still, the company is furthering its already horrible reputation for jerking subscribers around by continuing to play fast and loose with customer data. News of the server breach comes just two weeks after another report that in July 2018, MoviePass resorted to changing users’ passwords without their knowledge to thwart ticket purchases by heavy users after the company temporarily ran out of funds. Citing former MoviePass employees, Business Insider reported that the 2018 insolvency compelled Lowe to make Mission: Impossible — Fallout unavailable on MoviePass and ordered that half of its subscribers be locked out of the system over the Tom Cruise thriller’s opening weekend.
Rising from obscurity to national prominence in 2017 by basically subsidizing subscribers’ moviegoing habits — a $9.95 monthly subscription allowed for one movie ticket a day, every day — MoviePass coasted by on consumer goodwill for a few months before staggering from disaster to disaster: technological glitches, surprise ticketing blackouts, massive amounts of user fraud. It eventually evolved into what NASDAQ characterized in a stock analysis as a “failed business that burns through cash at an alarming rate.”
MoviePass revised its original price plan in April 2018, limiting users to just four movies a month — and dropping that number to three films four months later. The decisions triggered mass subscriber outrage and defection. This January, when the majority stakeholder and parent company of MoviePass, the data-analytics firm Helios and Matheson, spun off a new subsidiary called MoviePass Entertainment Holdings, Wall Street and Hollywood finally came around to what naysayers like the AMC theater chain had been complaining about all along: that the business model of MoviePass was fundamentally “unsustainable.”
Earlier this year, the company was spending an estimated $73 million a month to stay in operation. Helios and Matheson reported a net loss of $329.3 million last year, according to its most recent financial filing. And adding insult to the company’s already considerable injuries, on July 4 MoviePass suspended its service for several weeks to address technical issues and complete a redesign of its mobile app, and it announced its intention to “use this time to recapitalize in order to facilitate a seamless transition and improved subscriber experience once the service continues.”
But as Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth pointed out in an interview with Vulture earlier this year, unscrupulous subscribers who misused and defrauded MoviePass to the tune of tens of millions of dollars posed a much graver threat than cash burn. “They were giving out their passwords and codes, jumping from device to device,” he said. “Multiple people seeing movies off of one MoviePass card. Multiple cards, multiple addresses, multiple emails. We had people scalping tickets. So it was really trying to get a grip on the people that were really abusing the terms and conditions and ruining it for other people.”
To remedy some of those issues, MoviePass deployed big data with tactical precision: The company verifies that subscribers (as opposed to scalped-ticket purchasers, friends, or loved ones) are the ones whose butts are in theater seats by double-checking the physical location of users’ smartphones via the MoviePass app. “So now, we continue inside the movie theater when that movie’s kicking off to make sure you’re not two miles away having dinner and somebody else is in there with the ticket,” Farnsworth explained.
Furthermore, he contextualized his company’s awkward-stage contractions in terms of the trajectory of other disruptive start-ups. “When Airbnb and Uber were starting out, they had these system crashes. And no one cared because it wasn’t in the public eye,” he said. “We, unfortunately, were in the public eye nonstop. And people would just feed on it. But you know what? We’re still standing.”
@godofwine @tallblacknyc
By Chris Lee
Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
MoviePass just keeps shooting itself in the foot. On Wednesday, the beleaguered movie-ticketing subscription service confirmed that a security breach may have exposed tens of thousands of customers’ records online, where they may have remained unencrypted since early May. That information is alleged to include MoviePass card numbers and personal credit data including names, addresses, and card expiry dates — in other words, the building blocks for fraudulent financial transactions — all thanks to a lapse in password protection on a critical subdomain server.
“MoviePass recently discovered a security vulnerability that may have exposed customer records. After discovering the vulnerability, we immediately secured our systems to prevent further exposure and to mitigate the potential impact of this system,” chief executive Mitch Lowe said in a statement. “MoviePass takes this incident seriously and is dedicated to protecting our subscribers’ information. We are working diligently to investigate the scope of this incident and its potential impact on our subscribers. Once we gain a full understanding of the incident, we will promptly notify any affected subscribers snd the appropriate regulators or law enforcement.”
The announcement arrives as the latest self-inflicted calamity for the so-called Netflix of movies, which has remained in financial free fall for the better part of the past 17 months and has seen its goal of disrupting the theatrical-moviegoing business grow ever more remote. Dwindling from a user base of more than 3 million last year, MoviePass reportedly now boasts fewer than 225,000 subscribers.
Worse still, the company is furthering its already horrible reputation for jerking subscribers around by continuing to play fast and loose with customer data. News of the server breach comes just two weeks after another report that in July 2018, MoviePass resorted to changing users’ passwords without their knowledge to thwart ticket purchases by heavy users after the company temporarily ran out of funds. Citing former MoviePass employees, Business Insider reported that the 2018 insolvency compelled Lowe to make Mission: Impossible — Fallout unavailable on MoviePass and ordered that half of its subscribers be locked out of the system over the Tom Cruise thriller’s opening weekend.
Rising from obscurity to national prominence in 2017 by basically subsidizing subscribers’ moviegoing habits — a $9.95 monthly subscription allowed for one movie ticket a day, every day — MoviePass coasted by on consumer goodwill for a few months before staggering from disaster to disaster: technological glitches, surprise ticketing blackouts, massive amounts of user fraud. It eventually evolved into what NASDAQ characterized in a stock analysis as a “failed business that burns through cash at an alarming rate.”
MoviePass revised its original price plan in April 2018, limiting users to just four movies a month — and dropping that number to three films four months later. The decisions triggered mass subscriber outrage and defection. This January, when the majority stakeholder and parent company of MoviePass, the data-analytics firm Helios and Matheson, spun off a new subsidiary called MoviePass Entertainment Holdings, Wall Street and Hollywood finally came around to what naysayers like the AMC theater chain had been complaining about all along: that the business model of MoviePass was fundamentally “unsustainable.”
Earlier this year, the company was spending an estimated $73 million a month to stay in operation. Helios and Matheson reported a net loss of $329.3 million last year, according to its most recent financial filing. And adding insult to the company’s already considerable injuries, on July 4 MoviePass suspended its service for several weeks to address technical issues and complete a redesign of its mobile app, and it announced its intention to “use this time to recapitalize in order to facilitate a seamless transition and improved subscriber experience once the service continues.”
But as Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth pointed out in an interview with Vulture earlier this year, unscrupulous subscribers who misused and defrauded MoviePass to the tune of tens of millions of dollars posed a much graver threat than cash burn. “They were giving out their passwords and codes, jumping from device to device,” he said. “Multiple people seeing movies off of one MoviePass card. Multiple cards, multiple addresses, multiple emails. We had people scalping tickets. So it was really trying to get a grip on the people that were really abusing the terms and conditions and ruining it for other people.”
To remedy some of those issues, MoviePass deployed big data with tactical precision: The company verifies that subscribers (as opposed to scalped-ticket purchasers, friends, or loved ones) are the ones whose butts are in theater seats by double-checking the physical location of users’ smartphones via the MoviePass app. “So now, we continue inside the movie theater when that movie’s kicking off to make sure you’re not two miles away having dinner and somebody else is in there with the ticket,” Farnsworth explained.
Furthermore, he contextualized his company’s awkward-stage contractions in terms of the trajectory of other disruptive start-ups. “When Airbnb and Uber were starting out, they had these system crashes. And no one cared because it wasn’t in the public eye,” he said. “We, unfortunately, were in the public eye nonstop. And people would just feed on it. But you know what? We’re still standing.”
@godofwine @tallblacknyc
Moviepass Is Dead, Even After You Thought It Already Was
By Jordan Crucchiola@jorcru
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Two years after the crazy experiment of MoviePass began — allowing users to see up 30 movies a month in theaters for just a $10 subscription fee — the company is finally shutting down. The company’s ascent lasted a few months before reports of it hemorrhaging money starting popping up. It was briefly going to produce movies, with one Bruce Willis vehicle announced, but then things just started to come apart. Restrictions were placed how many movies subscribers could see in a month. Surge pricing hit. Users were unhappy. It was a general downhill slide, and come tomorrow the company will finally close up shop. As CNBC reports, though, “It has formed a strategic review committee, made up of the company’s independent directors, to explore ‘strategic and financial alternatives’ for the company.” Among those options is a sale of the MoviePass and all its components, which includes MoviePass, Moviefone, and MoviePass Films. So maybe, parts of the service will live on elsewhere like zombie limbs refusing to die.
By Jordan Crucchiola@jorcru
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Two years after the crazy experiment of MoviePass began — allowing users to see up 30 movies a month in theaters for just a $10 subscription fee — the company is finally shutting down. The company’s ascent lasted a few months before reports of it hemorrhaging money starting popping up. It was briefly going to produce movies, with one Bruce Willis vehicle announced, but then things just started to come apart. Restrictions were placed how many movies subscribers could see in a month. Surge pricing hit. Users were unhappy. It was a general downhill slide, and come tomorrow the company will finally close up shop. As CNBC reports, though, “It has formed a strategic review committee, made up of the company’s independent directors, to explore ‘strategic and financial alternatives’ for the company.” Among those options is a sale of the MoviePass and all its components, which includes MoviePass, Moviefone, and MoviePass Films. So maybe, parts of the service will live on elsewhere like zombie limbs refusing to die.
MoviePass cofounder Stacy Spikes has bought the company back and is planning a relaunch
MoviePass cofounder Stacy Spikes has bought back the movie-ticket subscription service. His bid was approved by a Southern District of New York bankruptcy court judge on Monday. Spikes said he hopes to relaunch the movie-ticket subscription service next year.
@godofwine
www.vulture.com
MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention
By Chris Lee@__ChrisLee
“I think we just need to stop talking about the facial-recognition part and just give them the free-ticket part,” says MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes. Photo: Lawrence M. Miner, Jr.
MoviePass knows about the memes. More specifically, Stacy Spikes, recently installed CEO of the embattled subscription-ticket service, has seen the response online to his Lincoln Center press conference last month announcing that the erstwhile “Netflix of cinemas” will be returning from the dead this summer. He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away for a bio break — a process that conjures images of both Black Mirror and A Clockwork Orange.
For the most part, Spikes is okay with the ribbing. But he objects to a particular characterization in headlines like Vulture’s “MoviePass Is Back, and This Time, It’s Dystopian.” “We’re already in dystopia,” Spikes exclaims. “Think about it: All of your social media, your ability to communicate with the outside world, is ad supported. You have to watch stuff in order to get what you want. If we want to talk about dystopian — we’re standing in it!”
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MoviePass exploded into public consciousness in 2017 by offering a movie-a-day subscription plan to participating theaters for the too-good-to-be-true rate of $9.95 a month. Since its founding in 2011, the company sought to shake up a movie-exhibition business dominated by large companies charging more and more, with little incentive to innovate the cinema-going experience. But the bigger play was always data harvesting: quantifying user spending patterns so that MoviePass could sell that info back to theater chains for a percentage of concessions sales and to movie studios for a cut of ticketing revenue. After growing from 20,000 paid subscribers to more than 3 million in a year — incurring the rancor of theater operators like AMC in the process — MoviePass buckled beneath its own ambitions. The company bled cash, with its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, reporting a net loss of $150.8 million in 2017 and $329.3 million in 2018. It staggered from disaster to disaster — unannounced ticketing blackouts, random technological outages, massive amounts of user fraud, inability to pay fulfillment processors without emergency cash loans — until MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for tickets anymore in 2019; it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy a year later.
Responsibility for that cascading sequence of fails fell upon MoviePass’s top executives: former CEO Mitch Lowe and chairman Ted Farnsworth. By then, Spikes, a former marketing exec for Miramax Films, October Films, and Sony Music who helped operate MoviePass as founding chief executive from 2011 until 2018, had been fired. During his relaunch presentation last month, Spikes projected a photograph of his two former colleagues holding MoviePass subscriber cards, their heads thrown back in laughter in manifest defiance of the industry pessimism that MoviePass faced. Yes, mistakes were made, the photo insinuated. No, they won’t be repeated.
Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth. Photo: Drew Osumi/MoviePass
During a recent conversation with Vulture, Spikes elucidated the ways MoviePass 2.0 will differ from its previous iteration, asserting the company will not only transcend existing skepticism but will thrive in a post-COVID era of streaming ascendancy, when theatrical moviegoing has become even more infrequent than it was at the company’s outset. He outlined an intent to build back better utilizing Web3 technology to enact a “consensual” customer relationship based around the accumulation and trade of crypto currency-like company credits, with subscribers effectively “selling” their attention rather than being foie gras-ed ad content against their wishes. Spikes insists that MoviePass’s “moonshot” goal of claiming 30 percent of the moviegoing market by 2030 is not just magical thinking. It is achievable if the company can make inroads with two separate but distinct constituencies: younger viewers who fled multiplexes for economically priced, subscription-based “walled gardens” like Netflix; as well as theater operators who, since the 2000s, have misguidedly recalibrated their business model to favor persuading customers to spend more on things like concessions and premium seating rather than convince them to come see movies at a regular clip. (See: AMC’s experiment in surge pricing for The Batman.)
Spikes characterizes the predicament as a kind of Information Age culture clash: A generation of viewers came of ticket-buying age just as the movie industry priced them out of the market. Today, they harbor no loyalty for cinemas; meanwhile, the theater chains are losing the ability to give patrons with any allegiances what they want. Then there is the divide in outlook between Tinseltown and Big Tech, a schism he describes by alluding to the 1982 sci-fi video-game thriller Tron. “Silicon Valley thinks in frequency. Hollywood thinks in, How much can I get that single ticket sold for?” the CEO says. “Remember Tron? They were always focused on cycles. I want to say, How many cycles did you get out of that person in a week, in a month, in a quarter, in a year? When you think like a computer, when you think like hardware, you think frequency of use.”
What MoviePass 1.0 succeeded in doing was pushing the country’s three major theater chains to either establish or enhance their own subscription ticketing programs — Regal Unlimited, Cinemark Movie Club, and AMC’s A-List — that reward customer loyalty with the kinds of discounts that promote further frequency of use. But 1.0’s extreme tactics, such as the sporadic inability to issue refunds or its penchant for expiring users’ account passwords to prevent ticket purchases, also left many subscribers feeling angry, disappointed, and generally jerked around. I ask Spikes why he finds it preferable to resurrect a company with a damaged reputation rather than leave it for dead. “The idea worked,” he says. “Fifty percent of theaters now have some form of what we started. They all laughed at us and said, ‘No one is going to do subscription.’ And now they all have it. But there’s still a huge swath of the movie industry” — i.e., smaller chains and independent cinema operators — “that can’t afford to go build out a multimillion-dollar subscription platform. If we can be that player, that’s half the market. So, hell yeah, I’ll take it.”
‘Your Attention Has Value and Should Be Controlled by You’
To be clear, relaunching MoviePass with PreShow as a component was not Spikes’s original plan. In fact, quite the opposite. Forced out by Helios and Matheson in early 2018 (for balking at Lowe’s decision to slash MoviePass’s subscription price from $30 to $9.95), Spikes’s unstated ambition for several years was to mount PreShow as a standalone rival to the company he had previously created. “We were actually going to see if we could get PreShow up and then create another MoviePass. But I had to wait. I had to do it in a way that wouldn’t violate the MoviePass patents — because I no longer owned my own patents.”
The idea behind PreShow: Madison Avenue spends around $11 billion a year on product placement in Hollywood films. PreShow took shape early on as a hypothetical: What if rather than trying to incept advertisements into a movie, there was some new system? One where advertisers would cover a percentage of ticket prices in exchange for a few minutes of a moviegoer’s attention? The app would require users to spend time watching ads in exchange for credit toward certain moviegoing experiences. Why not be totally upfront about the transaction?
“Your attention has value and should be controlled by you,” Spikes says. “So with PreShow we wanted to create the first technology that allows you to monetize your own attention and set a value exchange for that. This is decentralized. Instead of: I’m going to embed cookies, and I’m going to track everything you do, and I’m going to sell it, and I’m going to put that money back in my pocket; what we see is: I’m going to let you engage with the brand and monetize that.”
He uses the latest James Bond installment, No Time to Die, as a case study in how it should work. Rather than pay to have their brands quietly show up in scenes alongside Daniel Craig, the companies featured in that film — Heineken, Land Rover, Orlebar Brown, and Adidas among them — could pool, say, $20 million of their product-placement budget to pay for PreShow commercials instead. That money would cover a certain number of full or partial ticket purchases for PreShow subscribers, putting butts in seats and creating a supposedly deeper consumer engagement with the brands. The upshot, for Spikes: Both advertiser and consumer operate under total transparency. “Now [as an advertiser] I’ve tied myself into the movie even more than with the product placement,” Spikes says. “Now the consumer is directly relating to me. I’m getting to spend three minutes showing them a behind-the-scenes [feature] and talking to them. I can ask, Do you want to test drive a Land Rover?”
Somebody called MoviePass the ‘Christ brand’ because it got sacrificed.
He began fundraising for PreShow around the same time Farnsworth and Lowe were establishing MoviePass’s infamous $300 million line of credit (they would burn through nearly half a billion dollars in two years). Spikes was “crestfallen” at the time. As he tells it, deep-pocketed investors were less likely to bankroll “diversity” founders like himself and MoviePass co-founder Hamet Watt. “The fact of the matter is we couldn’t get more capital,” says Spikes. “And Mitch and Ted were able to access capital. Lots of it. A light switch went on: Oh wait, there’s not Black people at the front of the company anymore? You need more money? Here.”
Enter B.K. Fulton. The founding chairman and chief executive of the media investment company Soulidifly Productions, and a former director of technology programs and policy for the National Urban League, Fulton was a longtime professional acquaintance of Spikes who had helped beta test MoviePass in its early days. He had missed out on investing in version 1.0 during a friends-and-family round of financing. A decade later, though, Fulton was curious about Spikes’s post-MP moves and invited him to lunch. The meeting concluded with Fulton offering a check for “a big number” to cover the cost of registering PreShow’s patent and Spikes crying at the table in relief.
“Many people get second chances,” Fulton explains. “Many people get two, three, and four chances, especially if they don’t look like us. And so what I decided to do was invest in him and his technology. I didn’t do it because he was Black. I didn’t do it because I was Black. I did it because it was good technology; it was a great idea.”
Fulton’s money would have helped make it possible for PreShow to compete with MoviePass, had the latter company not dropped out of competition altogether. “PreShow ended up buying MoviePass,” Spike explains. The process began, notably, with a movie. Last summer, the producer of an unfinished documentary about MoviePass (who asked not to be named in this story) informed Spikes that the company was up for sale in a Southern District of New York bankruptcy auction. Spikes, who had given up trying to regain control of the company, was shocked to discover several streaming services had dropped out of the bidding because the customer data of MoviePass’s 3 million users was not included in the deal. He put in a bid in the fall of 2021. “We had to sit there for almost a month. No one spoke against the purchase,” he recalls. “And the judge says, ‘I’m granting it back to Mr. Spikes.’”
Prior to his November 2021 purchase, the CEO commissioned anonymous polling data through Google and SurveyMonkey to gauge whether consumers had held space in their hearts for the beleaguered ticketing service. He was encouraged when respondents seemed able to distinguish between the benefits of membership and corporate mismanagement under Farnsworth and Lowe. “The brand was healthy and intact,” Spikes says. “Consumers never stopped talking about their love for MoviePass. They were able to separate out what was suboptimal behavior of some bad actors and what was an incredible brand that people loved.”
Now, he likens his odyssey with MoviePass to the career path of a certain turtleneck-wearing tech titan who was famously dismissed from the company he helped found only to triumphantly return as its CEO more than a decade later. “It was very much like when Steve Jobs went back to Apple,” Spikes says.
‘I Think We Just Need to Stop Talking About the Facial-Recognition Part’
During the company’s February 10 press conference, Spikes side-stepped any mention of how much MoviePass 2.0’s subscriptions are going to cost. A data crunch is currently underway to establish three tiers of pricing in anticipation of the service’s public rollout during popcorn-movie season this year. (No official launch date has been announced beyond “Summer 2022.”) Spikes says the platform will employ a frequent-flyer-like system that encourages users to build up, purchase, and roll over credits toward movie-ticket purchases. The digital currency can also be traded with other subscribers via blockchain technology in further fealty to decentralized, Web3 ideals. Just don’t expect the return of that $9.95 a month pricing plan. “I can tell you there’s a range,” says Spikes. “You don’t want to be above, say, 30 [dollars]. And you want something that maybe is also low as an entry point for a person who might go once or twice a month. So you want that ceiling and floor.”
The CEO insists now is as good a time as any to relaunch: the right moment to “catch the wave” of patrons returning to the multiplex, even as pandemic conditions (and industry apprehensions concerning ticket sales) have yet to fully abate. Over Zoom, he shares his screen with me, revealing some of his polling data: 91 percent of poll respondents say they would be interested in trying the products shown in PreShow, 97 percent say they “love this concept.” “This is a real number! Ninety-seven percent said they would use this service multiple times a week!” Spikes exclaims. “I think we just need to stop talking about the facial-recognition part and just give them the free-ticket part.”
Movie-industry executives polled by Vulture voiced a wait-and-see outlook. They aren’t opposed to the new MoviePass per se, but don’t feel compelled to support it until box-office returns come in. Some industry observers see reason for cautious optimism, but with plenty of asterisks. Shawn Robbins, chief analyst for BoxOffice Pro, points out that competition for the under-25 market’s entertainment dollars is already fierce; unlike MoviePass, Regal Unlimited and Cinemark Movie Club can sweeten their membership deals with discounted concessions. And there are services like Mubi Go pursuing art-house cinema membership programs. “Young audiences are at the heart of theatrical recovery, so I believe there is an openness to subscription services that’s the norm in the entertainment world right now,” he tells Vulture. “That said, price points and benefits are king.” (The National Association of Theater Owners declined to comment for this article.) Spikes says he is in the process of hatching deals with theater partners outside the big three chains.
“Somebody called MoviePass the ‘Christ brand’ because it got sacrificed,” Spikes concludes. “The very people that were killing us, saying, ‘You can’t let this happen,’ became the biggest subscribers, right? The Roman emperors all became Christians. Now the bottom 50 percent of theaters has to catch up. And if you get 15 percent at the top, it’s just simple numbers. If the industry shifts its thinking, you have something that’s attainable.”
MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention
The plan was to use eyeball-tracking tech to mount a rival, but Stacy Spikes opted to raise the dead instead.
www.vulture.com
MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention
By Chris Lee@__ChrisLee
“I think we just need to stop talking about the facial-recognition part and just give them the free-ticket part,” says MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes. Photo: Lawrence M. Miner, Jr.
MoviePass knows about the memes. More specifically, Stacy Spikes, recently installed CEO of the embattled subscription-ticket service, has seen the response online to his Lincoln Center press conference last month announcing that the erstwhile “Netflix of cinemas” will be returning from the dead this summer. He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away for a bio break — a process that conjures images of both Black Mirror and A Clockwork Orange.
For the most part, Spikes is okay with the ribbing. But he objects to a particular characterization in headlines like Vulture’s “MoviePass Is Back, and This Time, It’s Dystopian.” “We’re already in dystopia,” Spikes exclaims. “Think about it: All of your social media, your ability to communicate with the outside world, is ad supported. You have to watch stuff in order to get what you want. If we want to talk about dystopian — we’re standing in it!”
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MoviePass exploded into public consciousness in 2017 by offering a movie-a-day subscription plan to participating theaters for the too-good-to-be-true rate of $9.95 a month. Since its founding in 2011, the company sought to shake up a movie-exhibition business dominated by large companies charging more and more, with little incentive to innovate the cinema-going experience. But the bigger play was always data harvesting: quantifying user spending patterns so that MoviePass could sell that info back to theater chains for a percentage of concessions sales and to movie studios for a cut of ticketing revenue. After growing from 20,000 paid subscribers to more than 3 million in a year — incurring the rancor of theater operators like AMC in the process — MoviePass buckled beneath its own ambitions. The company bled cash, with its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, reporting a net loss of $150.8 million in 2017 and $329.3 million in 2018. It staggered from disaster to disaster — unannounced ticketing blackouts, random technological outages, massive amounts of user fraud, inability to pay fulfillment processors without emergency cash loans — until MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for tickets anymore in 2019; it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy a year later.
Responsibility for that cascading sequence of fails fell upon MoviePass’s top executives: former CEO Mitch Lowe and chairman Ted Farnsworth. By then, Spikes, a former marketing exec for Miramax Films, October Films, and Sony Music who helped operate MoviePass as founding chief executive from 2011 until 2018, had been fired. During his relaunch presentation last month, Spikes projected a photograph of his two former colleagues holding MoviePass subscriber cards, their heads thrown back in laughter in manifest defiance of the industry pessimism that MoviePass faced. Yes, mistakes were made, the photo insinuated. No, they won’t be repeated.
Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth. Photo: Drew Osumi/MoviePass
During a recent conversation with Vulture, Spikes elucidated the ways MoviePass 2.0 will differ from its previous iteration, asserting the company will not only transcend existing skepticism but will thrive in a post-COVID era of streaming ascendancy, when theatrical moviegoing has become even more infrequent than it was at the company’s outset. He outlined an intent to build back better utilizing Web3 technology to enact a “consensual” customer relationship based around the accumulation and trade of crypto currency-like company credits, with subscribers effectively “selling” their attention rather than being foie gras-ed ad content against their wishes. Spikes insists that MoviePass’s “moonshot” goal of claiming 30 percent of the moviegoing market by 2030 is not just magical thinking. It is achievable if the company can make inroads with two separate but distinct constituencies: younger viewers who fled multiplexes for economically priced, subscription-based “walled gardens” like Netflix; as well as theater operators who, since the 2000s, have misguidedly recalibrated their business model to favor persuading customers to spend more on things like concessions and premium seating rather than convince them to come see movies at a regular clip. (See: AMC’s experiment in surge pricing for The Batman.)
Spikes characterizes the predicament as a kind of Information Age culture clash: A generation of viewers came of ticket-buying age just as the movie industry priced them out of the market. Today, they harbor no loyalty for cinemas; meanwhile, the theater chains are losing the ability to give patrons with any allegiances what they want. Then there is the divide in outlook between Tinseltown and Big Tech, a schism he describes by alluding to the 1982 sci-fi video-game thriller Tron. “Silicon Valley thinks in frequency. Hollywood thinks in, How much can I get that single ticket sold for?” the CEO says. “Remember Tron? They were always focused on cycles. I want to say, How many cycles did you get out of that person in a week, in a month, in a quarter, in a year? When you think like a computer, when you think like hardware, you think frequency of use.”
What MoviePass 1.0 succeeded in doing was pushing the country’s three major theater chains to either establish or enhance their own subscription ticketing programs — Regal Unlimited, Cinemark Movie Club, and AMC’s A-List — that reward customer loyalty with the kinds of discounts that promote further frequency of use. But 1.0’s extreme tactics, such as the sporadic inability to issue refunds or its penchant for expiring users’ account passwords to prevent ticket purchases, also left many subscribers feeling angry, disappointed, and generally jerked around. I ask Spikes why he finds it preferable to resurrect a company with a damaged reputation rather than leave it for dead. “The idea worked,” he says. “Fifty percent of theaters now have some form of what we started. They all laughed at us and said, ‘No one is going to do subscription.’ And now they all have it. But there’s still a huge swath of the movie industry” — i.e., smaller chains and independent cinema operators — “that can’t afford to go build out a multimillion-dollar subscription platform. If we can be that player, that’s half the market. So, hell yeah, I’ll take it.”
‘Your Attention Has Value and Should Be Controlled by You’
To be clear, relaunching MoviePass with PreShow as a component was not Spikes’s original plan. In fact, quite the opposite. Forced out by Helios and Matheson in early 2018 (for balking at Lowe’s decision to slash MoviePass’s subscription price from $30 to $9.95), Spikes’s unstated ambition for several years was to mount PreShow as a standalone rival to the company he had previously created. “We were actually going to see if we could get PreShow up and then create another MoviePass. But I had to wait. I had to do it in a way that wouldn’t violate the MoviePass patents — because I no longer owned my own patents.”
The idea behind PreShow: Madison Avenue spends around $11 billion a year on product placement in Hollywood films. PreShow took shape early on as a hypothetical: What if rather than trying to incept advertisements into a movie, there was some new system? One where advertisers would cover a percentage of ticket prices in exchange for a few minutes of a moviegoer’s attention? The app would require users to spend time watching ads in exchange for credit toward certain moviegoing experiences. Why not be totally upfront about the transaction?
“Your attention has value and should be controlled by you,” Spikes says. “So with PreShow we wanted to create the first technology that allows you to monetize your own attention and set a value exchange for that. This is decentralized. Instead of: I’m going to embed cookies, and I’m going to track everything you do, and I’m going to sell it, and I’m going to put that money back in my pocket; what we see is: I’m going to let you engage with the brand and monetize that.”
He uses the latest James Bond installment, No Time to Die, as a case study in how it should work. Rather than pay to have their brands quietly show up in scenes alongside Daniel Craig, the companies featured in that film — Heineken, Land Rover, Orlebar Brown, and Adidas among them — could pool, say, $20 million of their product-placement budget to pay for PreShow commercials instead. That money would cover a certain number of full or partial ticket purchases for PreShow subscribers, putting butts in seats and creating a supposedly deeper consumer engagement with the brands. The upshot, for Spikes: Both advertiser and consumer operate under total transparency. “Now [as an advertiser] I’ve tied myself into the movie even more than with the product placement,” Spikes says. “Now the consumer is directly relating to me. I’m getting to spend three minutes showing them a behind-the-scenes [feature] and talking to them. I can ask, Do you want to test drive a Land Rover?”
Somebody called MoviePass the ‘Christ brand’ because it got sacrificed.
He began fundraising for PreShow around the same time Farnsworth and Lowe were establishing MoviePass’s infamous $300 million line of credit (they would burn through nearly half a billion dollars in two years). Spikes was “crestfallen” at the time. As he tells it, deep-pocketed investors were less likely to bankroll “diversity” founders like himself and MoviePass co-founder Hamet Watt. “The fact of the matter is we couldn’t get more capital,” says Spikes. “And Mitch and Ted were able to access capital. Lots of it. A light switch went on: Oh wait, there’s not Black people at the front of the company anymore? You need more money? Here.”
Enter B.K. Fulton. The founding chairman and chief executive of the media investment company Soulidifly Productions, and a former director of technology programs and policy for the National Urban League, Fulton was a longtime professional acquaintance of Spikes who had helped beta test MoviePass in its early days. He had missed out on investing in version 1.0 during a friends-and-family round of financing. A decade later, though, Fulton was curious about Spikes’s post-MP moves and invited him to lunch. The meeting concluded with Fulton offering a check for “a big number” to cover the cost of registering PreShow’s patent and Spikes crying at the table in relief.
“Many people get second chances,” Fulton explains. “Many people get two, three, and four chances, especially if they don’t look like us. And so what I decided to do was invest in him and his technology. I didn’t do it because he was Black. I didn’t do it because I was Black. I did it because it was good technology; it was a great idea.”
Fulton’s money would have helped make it possible for PreShow to compete with MoviePass, had the latter company not dropped out of competition altogether. “PreShow ended up buying MoviePass,” Spike explains. The process began, notably, with a movie. Last summer, the producer of an unfinished documentary about MoviePass (who asked not to be named in this story) informed Spikes that the company was up for sale in a Southern District of New York bankruptcy auction. Spikes, who had given up trying to regain control of the company, was shocked to discover several streaming services had dropped out of the bidding because the customer data of MoviePass’s 3 million users was not included in the deal. He put in a bid in the fall of 2021. “We had to sit there for almost a month. No one spoke against the purchase,” he recalls. “And the judge says, ‘I’m granting it back to Mr. Spikes.’”
Prior to his November 2021 purchase, the CEO commissioned anonymous polling data through Google and SurveyMonkey to gauge whether consumers had held space in their hearts for the beleaguered ticketing service. He was encouraged when respondents seemed able to distinguish between the benefits of membership and corporate mismanagement under Farnsworth and Lowe. “The brand was healthy and intact,” Spikes says. “Consumers never stopped talking about their love for MoviePass. They were able to separate out what was suboptimal behavior of some bad actors and what was an incredible brand that people loved.”
Now, he likens his odyssey with MoviePass to the career path of a certain turtleneck-wearing tech titan who was famously dismissed from the company he helped found only to triumphantly return as its CEO more than a decade later. “It was very much like when Steve Jobs went back to Apple,” Spikes says.
‘I Think We Just Need to Stop Talking About the Facial-Recognition Part’
During the company’s February 10 press conference, Spikes side-stepped any mention of how much MoviePass 2.0’s subscriptions are going to cost. A data crunch is currently underway to establish three tiers of pricing in anticipation of the service’s public rollout during popcorn-movie season this year. (No official launch date has been announced beyond “Summer 2022.”) Spikes says the platform will employ a frequent-flyer-like system that encourages users to build up, purchase, and roll over credits toward movie-ticket purchases. The digital currency can also be traded with other subscribers via blockchain technology in further fealty to decentralized, Web3 ideals. Just don’t expect the return of that $9.95 a month pricing plan. “I can tell you there’s a range,” says Spikes. “You don’t want to be above, say, 30 [dollars]. And you want something that maybe is also low as an entry point for a person who might go once or twice a month. So you want that ceiling and floor.”
The CEO insists now is as good a time as any to relaunch: the right moment to “catch the wave” of patrons returning to the multiplex, even as pandemic conditions (and industry apprehensions concerning ticket sales) have yet to fully abate. Over Zoom, he shares his screen with me, revealing some of his polling data: 91 percent of poll respondents say they would be interested in trying the products shown in PreShow, 97 percent say they “love this concept.” “This is a real number! Ninety-seven percent said they would use this service multiple times a week!” Spikes exclaims. “I think we just need to stop talking about the facial-recognition part and just give them the free-ticket part.”
Movie-industry executives polled by Vulture voiced a wait-and-see outlook. They aren’t opposed to the new MoviePass per se, but don’t feel compelled to support it until box-office returns come in. Some industry observers see reason for cautious optimism, but with plenty of asterisks. Shawn Robbins, chief analyst for BoxOffice Pro, points out that competition for the under-25 market’s entertainment dollars is already fierce; unlike MoviePass, Regal Unlimited and Cinemark Movie Club can sweeten their membership deals with discounted concessions. And there are services like Mubi Go pursuing art-house cinema membership programs. “Young audiences are at the heart of theatrical recovery, so I believe there is an openness to subscription services that’s the norm in the entertainment world right now,” he tells Vulture. “That said, price points and benefits are king.” (The National Association of Theater Owners declined to comment for this article.) Spikes says he is in the process of hatching deals with theater partners outside the big three chains.
“Somebody called MoviePass the ‘Christ brand’ because it got sacrificed,” Spikes concludes. “The very people that were killing us, saying, ‘You can’t let this happen,’ became the biggest subscribers, right? The Roman emperors all became Christians. Now the bottom 50 percent of theaters has to catch up. And if you get 15 percent at the top, it’s just simple numbers. If the industry shifts its thinking, you have something that’s attainable.”
‘MoviePass, MovieCrash’ Review: HBO Doc Is an Effectively Nostalgic Communal Wake for Film Fans
Muta'Ali's documentary looks back at what went right and then very wrong with the innovative, doomed service.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
MoviePass, MovieCrash
SXSW 2024 Schedule | "MoviePass, MovieCrash" chronicles the origin story, meteoric rise and stranger-than-fiction implosion of the theatrical movie subscription app, MoviePass, as told through the eyes of the visionary co-founders. The film details the unique challenges they faced in building...
CEO Says MoviePass Will Test Ads On Its Platform, Offer Cheaper Tickets To Users Who Watch Them
MoviePass will give users buying tickets on its app the option of watching an advertising pod in exchange for credits.
deadline.com
@Helico-pterFunk @ViCiouS
SXSW 2024 Review: 'Movie Pass, Movie Crash' Exposes Racial Barriers Towards Black Entrepreneurs
The story of the theatrical movie app Movie Pass is one of triumph and tragedy. And for those who may have heard some of the tales of its demise, don’t know the full story of what happened. Until now. In the HBO documentary film Movie Pass, Movie Crash directed by Muta’Ali, the co-founding visionari
blackgirlnerds.com
Black Girl Nerds on Instagram: "Director Muta’Ali, Movie Pass Co-Founder/CEO Stacey Spikes and Movie Pass Founder Hamet Watt ✨✨✨ #SXSW24 #MoviePassMovieCrash #MoviePass"
12 likes, 0 comments - blackgirlnerds on March 9, 2024: "Director Muta’Ali, Movie Pass Co-Founder/CEO Stacey Spikes and Movie Pass Founder Hamet Watt �..."
www.instagram.com
CEO Says MoviePass Will Test Ads On Its Platform, Offer Cheaper Tickets To Users Who Watch Them
MoviePass will give users buying tickets on its app the option of watching an advertising pod in exchange for credits.
@Helico-pterFunk @ViCiouS
I don't think Moviepass was ever offered / available locally (westcoast of Canada).
