It lived life 2 thumbs up... Unlimited movie tickets for $10/month. MoviePass was truly Netflix, but in-theater. It sounded too good to be true... and it was. Its parent company, Helios and Matheson, officially shut down the all-you-can-eat movie buffet subscription on Saturday after an epic run. Helios shares hit $5,100 at peak MoviePass insanity. Today they're $0.0018.
Let's look back on a short life well-watched...
- Act I - Irrelevance: Founded in 2011, MoviePass offered a $40/month subscription that let you into any theater to watch any movie. Worth it only for the very lonely and movie-crazy.
- Act II - The new guy in town: Mitch Lowe was hired as CEO. There were only 20K customers, so he cut the price by 75%.
- Act III - Peak insanity: At $10/month, the breakeven price for MoviePass was 1 movie per month, so people signed up. 3M people binged 5% of all movies watched in late 2018.
- Act IV - The reckoning: Theaters still charged full price for each ticket, forcing MoviePass to pay the difference — and lose $21M/month ("Amazon lost money for 20 years" — the CEO). So it had to raise prices/add a bunch of restrictions.
- Act V - This Saturday: It's over. The parent company doesn't know when or if it will come back.
- Post-credit scene: Globo-theater-chain AMC now offers something like MoviePass. MoviePass "pulled a Napster": it changed the industry even though it didn't survive.