I'm not 1000% up on how they tried to do it, but I remember seeing (on HN, I think) that they would see a non-chain theater be popular, and so they would threat

I'm not 1000% up on how they tried to do it, but I remember seeing (on HN, I think) that they would see a non-chain theater be popular, and so they would threaten to not list their theater in the app unless they gave them a cut. The commenter said they saw it with 2 theaters, both initially told MoviePass to go pound sand, so they were delisted. One barely noticed, but the other saw a significant decline in patronage, so they had to go back to MoviePass, hat in hand.