Six months after MoviePass began placing numerous restrictions on its subscribers in an attempt to prevent the service from completely shutting down, the company today has relaunched with a new advertising campaign and the promise of a new unlimited plan.
As reported by Variety, the so-called "MoviePass 2.0" is rolling out with a few new plans this month, with prices that change depending on your region. Plans start at $9.95/month for three movies per month, but you're limited to only a selection of specific films available each day. This "Select" plan is cheaper for people in the middle of the country, because tickets are generally cheaper in smaller cities, and in big cities it'll be priced at $14.95/month.
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There's a mid-tier "All Access" plan priced at $14.95 in small cities, allowing access to all 2D films with the usual three films per month limit. Lastly, the top-tier plan is called "Red Carpet," and it is priced at $19.95/month. On this plan, subscribers can see any three movies of their choosing per month, even in IMAX, 3D, and other premium formats. In big cities, Red Carpet will cost as much as $24.95/month.
All of these new plans still restrict every MoviePass subscriber to just three movies per month, but MoviePass executive vice president Khalid Itum said that the company is gearing up to reintroduce an unlimited subscription plan very soon. Next week, a form of the original MoviePass unlimited plan will be unveiled, but pricing and specific plan details were not covered today.
MoviePass says that after losing subscribers steadily over the past few months, it has started to again increase its numbers and customer sentiment has improved.
Prior to launching the new plans, only 44% of customers had a positive feeling towards MoviePass, according to data collected by NetBase. Last week, that rose to 59% of respondents having a positive view.
“I feel like we’re turning a corner,” said Itum.
In total, Itum says that MoviePass will stop focusing on being a "disruptor" of the industry in attempt to remove the friction between itself and theater chains. This means it will no longer take large cuts of any concessions it helps to sell by getting people to theaters, but will instead charge a small service fee for items it sells. The company will also no longer ask theaters to give MoviePass a discount on tickets that it sells.
Itum is also working on a "red label" solution for exhibitors, which would help them to launch their own theater subscription programs using the MoviePass platform and existing technology. Overall, the vice president described MoviePass as adopting a "more humble" posture in 2019: "Our new business strategy is stabilize, optimize, and grow," he said.
Whether that works for the company remains to be seen. MoviePass originally made waves in August 2017 as the company dropped the price of its main subscription plan to just $9.95/month, allowing users to watch one standard 2D film every day of each month. That price point lasted for nearly one year, and eventually the company added on surge pricing, blockbuster movie restrictions, price hikes, and removed the unlimited monthly plan completely.
Top Rated Comments
MoviePass needs critical mass to make this profitable. Losing subscribers is the inverse of that. They need the majority of their users to not use the entire allocation...just like people who pay for streaming and listen a few times a day to offset the cost of streamers who leave their music playing 24/7. If they have 50K people watching 3 movies a month, they're going to go out of business soon. They need another 100K people watching 1 movie a month.
MoviePass reminds me of that episode of The Office where the new paper company sits down with a financial advisor and learns they’re going broke. “I looked at the numbers and as sales grow we’ll be profitable.” “Under a fixed cost system yes, but that’s not how it works.” “Crunch the numbers again.” “It’s a program, you can’t just...” “Just, crunch them.”They could ONLY ever be profitable under the gym membership model, as in 90% of people PAY, but don’t ever use the facilities.
MoviePass lost all market credibility with their constant changes for the worse. I can't see how anyone can ever trust them again to provide even this minimal level of service without yanking out the rug under them on no notice.