13 ms·

MoviePass keeps plan at $10, but limits subscribers to three movies a month

109 points by sahin-boydas 8y ago

akuji1993 8y ago
Yeah, this service is going to disappear. They might have a few months of runway left, getting picked up by a few investments, but I don't see them surviving this downfall.
- Touche 8y ago
  For sure, you can't slash your offering by 90% while keeping the price the same and survive. A business always needs to keep in mind exactly what it is that they are offering their customers. MoviePass offered their customers the ability to not have to think about budgeting for movies. Now that that's gone, what is this service, exactly? A discounted pre-payment for 3 movies? MoviePass is now a coupon.
  - turtle4 8y ago
    If I pay $10 a month and see 3 movies that are normally $11 apiece (local tickets are $10.75), that's a pretty clear value proposition. How can you ask what the service is with a straight face? Are you honestly implying that if I have to think at all, a 200% return on my money isn't good enough? I don't really understand anyone who would even care that much about this change. I can barely find time to go to the theater 3 times a month let alone more. The changes that limit the most popular movies were much worse, honestly. I don't think they are going to last, because even with this reduced offering I don't see how an outlay of $33 for a $10 subscription works. As long as I see at least one movie a month using the service I more than break even though, so I'll stay subscribed month to month until they go under.
    - darkstar999 8y ago
      > 200% return on my money You aren't getting a "return" on anything.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      When you pull the old "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." routine every few weeks, just being a moderately good deal isn't good enough because you can't trust that you will actually get the deal that they say they are offering.
    - akuji1993 8y ago
      I completely agree with you. But all these signs of MoviePass altering their offering again and again just points to them being headless and in "survival mode", trying to find anything that can keep them afloat. From the outside, it just seems like it's not profitable at all to let subscribers pay $10 and give them $33 of value (earlier it was a lot more for some outliers) back. That just can't work longterm. I wonder what their longterm goals look like, how are they going to make their money back? What's the plan for that?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Talyen42 8y ago
While it was a great deal, I don't like to use services that change the rules every 24 hours, so I canceled my subscription.
- sp332 8y ago
  That's why I cancelled mine too. I am grateful to them for pouring millions of dollars into letting people see more movies, and proving that people really are interested in seeing movies if only they were less overpriced. AMC at least got the message and is starting their own subscription service. Hopefully other theaters will take notice.
- finaliteration 8y ago
  This is why I haven’t even bothered to sign up, as much as I love going to the movies. I don’t really want to spend money on something that may not be worth as much the following day. I’m pretty sure that’s just called investing.
  - verletx64 8y ago
    Why not just cancel it when the terms become unfavourable? You're just losing out this way.
- yalogin 8y ago
  I don’t get it. It’s still a great deal, unless the deal is a net negative to you why do you care? You must see that the initial deal was too generous and unsustainable right?
  - sp332 8y ago
    Some days it's a great deal. Some days they don't let you see the movie you wanted, or you have to pay 8 extra dollars, or they run out of money and half of the methods of buying tickets stop working. Each with less than 24 hours notice. Yeah it's unsustainable and I was planning to unsubscribe when they raised their prices. Instead I cancelled when they started jerking users around. Well, after the 3rd or 4th time.
ulkesh 8y ago
It was a horrible service in the beginning and it still is. It won't matter how much it changes hands. You cannot ask a customer to pay money, commit to a contract (they required this in the early days), and then limit their use in various ways. In the beginning, you could see one movie per day which was great, but you couldn't share the account with your spouse, you couldn't use multiple devices, and you couldn't see the same movie twice if I am remembering correctly. And that was when it was $30/month (albeit a cheap price if able to take true advantage of the movie-watching). And now they're changing the terms, seemingly on a weekly basis. It has been a complete failure throughout its run. It's time for MoviePass to go away.
- nyrulez 8y ago
  I find your message hilarious. Do you have better alternatives if you're calling this horrible?
  - morsch 8y ago
    Netflix
    - deathanatos 8y ago
      > 3.4. Changes to the Price and Subscription Plans. We reserve the right to change our subscription plans or adjust pricing for our service or any components thereof in any manner and at any time as we may determine in our sole and absolute discretion. Except as otherwise expressly provided for in these Terms of Use, any price changes or changes to your subscription plan will take effect following notice to you. And there is a forced arbitration clause (and as much as I think those are a mockery of our legal system), this would seem to allow fairly substantial changes at any time.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        Yeah, except for the fact that historically they have never pulled any crap approaching the ongoing drama that is MoviePass. The biggest shift I recall is the move to split the DVD/streaming services, which I think was completely reasonable.
mc32 8y ago
I don’t watch movies, so i don’t demand characteristics, but why not have several tiers at diff price points?
- michaelt 8y ago
  If their business model relies on people paying but not going (a business model some gyms use) they want the low-attending people on the most expensive plan possible. Offering cheaper tiers would prevent that.
k1ns 8y ago
I might be uneducated about the issue as a whole, but I don't really see the negative side to this service. $10/month for 3 viewings per month. That's 3 movies for the price of 0.76 movies where I'm from (last time I went tickets were $13). Then, after you hit that cap, extra viewings are $5 less per ticket which has to be less than any one movie ticket for any new feature anywhere in America. Am I missing something? Are they just getting hate because they lacked foresight in the beginning? Is it because they gambled with investor money on a ridiculous business model? I have a genuine curiosity around where the hate is coming from. I don't like going to movie theaters but if I did I would think this was a great deal. EDIT: to correct the misinformation that each additional ticket was $5
- untog 8y ago
  It is a great deal. The problem is that MoviePass persisted for so long with a model that made no financial sense whatsoever, and now their customers have gotten used to it. There's no way to sell this as anything other than a giant downgrade.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    > MoviePass persisted for so long with a model that made no financial sense whatsoever You can say that about almost every start up discussed on HN
    - cm2012 8y ago
      That's not really true. MoviePass is an outlier in its crazy business model that loses money on every customer. Most other start-ups just have high cap ex but make marginal profits per sale.
      - jrs95 8y ago
        Funny enough I worked at a ecommerce clothing “startup” that had upwards of $75 million in sales but wasn’t profitable
edgarvaldes 8y ago
In the threads about privacy, it is common to read some comments that propose to exchange your information for some benefit. MoviePass indicates that this is not as easy as it seems.
bena 8y ago
Weird, it's almost like theaters were charging what they charge for actual reasons rather than "corporate greed".
- apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
  Er... the actual cost of someone going to the theater is irrelevant here. The only cost that matters is what the theaters are charging since that is what MoviePass has to cover. If they can't cover that, they can't provide their service. It doesn't matter if the theater is charging $3 or $30 per ticket; if MoviePass cannot, at a bare minimum, cover that cost, they cannot continue their service. Which is what happened two weekends ago when their service was briefly shut down due to failed payments until they took out an emergency $5M loan to cover things.
  - bena 8y ago
    > the actual cost of someone going to the theater is irrelevant here. The only cost that matters is what the theaters are charging since that is what MoviePass has to cover. These two things are tied. A theater is not going to give a discount it can't give. The theaters will not sell a ticket at a loss just because MoviePass is asking for 100 tickets at a time. MoviePass thought they could leverage being the source of a lot of sales into getting discounts from theater chains. But theaters are simply telling MoviePass that the prices are what they are. They make money elsewhere. Investing more into MoviePass really seems like throwing good money after bad.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wild_preference 8y ago
  This sort of sarcasm obfuscates your message. Frankly I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Surely it’s best to just come out and say it without the noncommittal “it’s almost as if” deflection.
  - bena 8y ago
amf12 8y ago
I don't understand why they did not also raise the cost to something like $15 a month. $10 was too low in my opinion. I assumed they might increase it to $15 sometime later, which is still a good deal for consumers, if you consider the average cost to be $9
- passivepinetree 8y ago
  Where do you live that the average cost of a movie ticket is only $9? I’ve seen tickets fully twice that expensive at AMCs in San Francisco.
  - potlee 8y ago
    I hope you know San Francisco is an expensive place
    - monksy 8y ago
      $18 at the Regal near me for "RPX" (aka premium times) in Chicago.
    - maccard 8y ago
      I live somewhere much cheaper than SF, and tickets are regularly £10-£11 (which is about $15 give or take)
    - jonknee 8y ago
      But Movie Pass charges the same amount no matter where you live so you'd expect it to be much more popular in expensive places. It would be challenging to come up with a worse business model than Movie Pass.
  - amf12 8y ago
    Try small towns, college towns, middle of nowhere.
laken 8y ago
I switched from MoviePass last week to AMC's MoviePass rebuttal, called AMC A-List. The AMC program is $20/month, for three movies a week, in any format, with online advanced-booking. With this change, I don't see why MoviePass subscribers would not just switch to A-List if their main theatre is an AMC.
- idbehold 8y ago
  Perhaps because it's twice the price.
  - laken 8y ago
    Yes, although among my circles of MoviePass-using friends, many had been paying over $20/month recently with various MoviePass upcharges. And MoviePass also still doesn't allow movies that haven't been in the theatres for at least two weeks, no formats other than standard, and annoying $4 surge charges for some showings.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    Twice the price for four times as many movies, without blackouts, but only from one theater chain. And there's a better chance that the rules won't change next week.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Yeah but you actually get to see movies you want to see... lately this is looking a hell of a lot cheaper than MoviePass' "pay us $10 to see nothing" offering.
- jackmodern 8y ago
  Stubs A-List is leaps and bounds better than moviepass, the extra $10 is really negligible as well. Being able to book seats days in advance through an app that isn't actively trying to screw you over with GPS limitations is just so nice. The cost of one imax ticket at the metreon more than covers A-List too. It's really a great deal.
- kardos 8y ago
empath75 8y ago
> “Because only 15 percent of MoviePass members see four or more movies a month, we expect that the new subscription model will have no impact whatsoever on over 85 percent of our subscribers.” Is it the same 15% seeing 4 movies a month? I suspect not.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
This is fine. There's barely 3 good movies released per month .
ryantuck 8y ago
One thing I am struggling to understand is why MoviePass is paying theaters full price for tickets, essentially needing to take on the same economics as an insurance company. If I'm a theater, I'm incentivized to put butts in seats and make my markup on concessions. If MoviePass is helping to put lots of butts in otherwise empty seats, I imagine I'd be willing to provide tickets to MoviePass at a discounted rate. I'm not sure how much that helps MoviePass's bottom line, but my initial guess is that it would be nontrivial. What don't I understand about the incentives and economics here?
- cwyers 8y ago
  Because the theaters don't need MoviePass to offer discounts? They can offer discounts directly to the consumers. MoviePass is an intermediary to the transaction that offers no value and tries to consume value.
  - dwild 8y ago
    > They can offer discounts directly to the consumers. I offer discount at my company, will you takes it? Why no one is taking it? Marketing is the reason. It's great to have a discount but at the end of the day, you still need to promote that discount. Promoting to a market that's not yours, a market that you don't know and you don't even want to deal with (cheap ass consumer), doesn't make sense. MoviePass is the king of cheap ass market, they know how to reach them, they know how to make money out of them and you literally have NOTHING to invest to get that market. That's the value of MoviePass. You just take their client...
- emsy 8y ago
  I don’t know about the US, but I talked with a someone who runs a cinema in Germany and he said that for example Disney dictates the prices, leaving him with small margins. This is also the reason why they have to sell a certain amount of drinks and popcorn (at a high price point) to stay afloat.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    If they continue like this cinemas will just die out. My local cinema however is offering a "Sneak Preview" on Mondays. For 5€ you get to see some (unknown on ticket purchase) new movie that people have actually put some effort into (non "block busters", a.k.a. transformers part 500). There I have seen Shape of Water, Hotel Artemis and Searching. I will see another one this evening. With adaptions like these maybe they'll survive a bit longer. I certainly enjoy the offering.
pg_bot 8y ago
I don't understand why MoviePass doesn't just close up shop. Their popularity stemmed from selling a dollar for 50 cents. There is no business here, they should quit while they are behind.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Arrogance.
Accacin 8y ago
The price seems fine, I'd be happy with it. The problem I have is the amount of tracking they're apparently doing. That's the bit that makes me not use the service (not that I can in my country, but my point still stands).
evanelias 8y ago
At the moment, Google is displaying MoviePass's parent company's market cap as only $189K [1]. Yahoo Finance is showing an even lower number, $141K [2]. If these numbers are accurate, that's pretty astounding -- if you buy $2000 of shares on the public market, you'd own over 1% of the company! That said, I can't imagine they're actually correct, given the share volumes changing hands. Finance apps seem to have trouble with stock splits, share buybacks, post-IPO equity offerings and the like... is there no good data source for number of shares outstanding of a company? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:HMNY https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:HMNY [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HMNY?p=HMNY https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HMNY?p=HMNY
- schintan 8y ago
  Bloomberg shows it as 542K, which I believe is fairly accurate.
- mikestew 8y ago
  You won't be able to buy $2000 worth of HMNY without driving the price up (EDIT: maybe not, at 350MM shares traded as of this morning; who the hell is trading this turd?). Then when reality kicks in and the price drops back down, you're sitting on shares even more worthless than they were today at $0.06. I mean, if you think you can turn it around, go for it. Some folks on HN could pay for it out of petty cash.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  Its also a fantastic way to lose $2000. This company is dead, no questions about it.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    It would be a fantastic gamble. With gambling comes the chance to lose a lot of money, but also a small chance to win a lot of money. I currently own around 2500 shares of HMNY, and it is a 100% gamble. I'm hoping someone better acquires them, or they bring in a better management team. But I dropped a total of $450 on these shares, so if I make $500, my gamble paid off. This company isn't invest-able, but it is gamble-able.
hypersoar 8y ago
I see a lot of people saying that $10 for 3 movies/month still sounds like a pretty good deal. It might be, but there are loads of other issues that make it more expensive and less useable: - They recently added surcharges for what they call "peak pricing". When I looked at showtimes a couple Sundays ago, every showing after 10:00am had a $6-$8 surcharge. - Some showtimes just aren't available. After seeing all those surcharges, I tried again the next day. There were no extra fees, but the showings between 6pm and 8pm were not shown in the app. And this was for non-blockbusters that have been out for 2-4 weeks. - Their CEO has said (in a way that hasn't really been communicated to users) that they're no longer going to offer tickets for new mainstream movies. It's not at all clear which movies will be included. - The service has gone down a couple times in the last couple of weeks because they ran out of money to pay for tickets. There's no way to know ahead of time if the app will actually work when you get to the theater (and you can't buy tickets before then unless you go to the theater earlier on the same day). So, it's not $10/month for 3 movies. It's $10/month for 3 movies, excluding new films, with likely surcharges on weekends and many convenient showtimes blacked out. Also, sometimes it doesn't work.
- nodja 8y ago
  Read the article. > The company says the newly updated plans will include “many” major first run films from studios, wording that appears to confirm MoviePass’ plans to limit access to certain blockbusters, a trend that began with the latest Mission: Impossible film. For the time being, however, it’s agreed to suspend Peak Pricing and Ticket Verification to help appease existing users who are migrated over to the new plan. To me it sounds they're removing peak pricing and being more conscious about restricting movies.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    > To me it sounds they're removing peak pricing and being more conscious about restricting movies. Until they aren't. MoviePass changes the deal way too often to have any certainty except about one thing: the deal gets worse all the time. As a customer, you have to try and guess what the value prop is going to be later on after the next round of changes.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
I bought a yearly 70ish dollar package from them and I feel like I've been robbed of the product that I paid upfront for. However I've seen 25ish movies with my movie pass so I guess I've made my money back but it's still very frustrating. Their CS is so poor too.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  You feel robbed that you saw around 25 movies for less than $3 each?
  - Taylor_OD 8y ago
    I felt robbed that I paid for a product and then the product I received was different than what I paid for. A lot of the 25 movies I wouldnt actually have seen if I had to pay full price. If I went to a restaurant and ordered a BLT, paid, and then a two slices of bread with bacon came out. I'd be disappointed even though I like bacon... I didnt receive what I paid upfront for. Even if I got something I will still feel like I was taken advantage of. Adding on the fast that when I would ask the waiter/waitress why I didnt receive what I paid for and a refund I'd be ignored...
cheeyoonlee 8y ago
I've always used and now plan to stick with Sinemia. Advanced ticketing through any online site like Fandango, works at any theater, works for 3D/4DX/IMAX/premium formats. It's still limited to 3 movies a month but for the price and all these "better" features it's definitely worth it for me and the girlfriend. Here's the thing though, Sinemia stuck with these features and pricing model from the start so it made sense financially for them and was still a great deal. At this point MoviePass seems like they're clinging for life and all my peers on their plan express frustration every time these frequent changes occur. I'd like to link my referral code but I think their own signup offerings are better -
- cheeze 8y ago
  Sinemia is so much better it's insane! I feel bad for my friends when we go to movies and they use MoviePass. Seems like they have so many restrictions, whereas I can just buy tix online whenever to _any_ showing.
rongenre 8y ago
I cancelled this weekend: surcharge for a two-week old not-exactly-blockbuster was annoying, but meh. On Saturday, the app listed a theater showing something I wanted to see, I drove there, and then... couldn't check in and was no longer listed when I refreshed the theater. I'd expect them to keep playing this kind of game.

109 points by sahin-boydas 8y ago

akuji1993 8y ago

Yeah, this service is going to disappear. They might have a few months of runway left, getting picked up by a few investments, but I don't see them surviving this downfall.

Touche 8y ago
For sure, you can't slash your offering by 90% while keeping the price the same and survive. A business always needs to keep in mind exactly what it is that they are offering their customers. MoviePass offered their customers the ability to not have to think about budgeting for movies. Now that that's gone, what is this service, exactly? A discounted pre-payment for 3 movies? MoviePass is now a coupon.
- turtle4 8y ago
  If I pay $10 a month and see 3 movies that are normally $11 apiece (local tickets are $10.75), that's a pretty clear value proposition. How can you ask what the service is with a straight face? Are you honestly implying that if I have to think at all, a 200% return on my money isn't good enough? I don't really understand anyone who would even care that much about this change. I can barely find time to go to the theater 3 times a month let alone more. The changes that limit the most popular movies were much worse, honestly. I don't think they are going to last, because even with this reduced offering I don't see how an outlay of $33 for a $10 subscription works. As long as I see at least one movie a month using the service I more than break even though, so I'll stay subscribed month to month until they go under.
  - darkstar999 8y ago
    > 200% return on my money You aren't getting a "return" on anything.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    When you pull the old "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." routine every few weeks, just being a moderately good deal isn't good enough because you can't trust that you will actually get the deal that they say they are offering.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    I completely agree with you. But all these signs of MoviePass altering their offering again and again just points to them being headless and in "survival mode", trying to find anything that can keep them afloat. From the outside, it just seems like it's not profitable at all to let subscribers pay $10 and give them $33 of value (earlier it was a lot more for some outliers) back. That just can't work longterm. I wonder what their longterm goals look like, how are they going to make their money back? What's the plan for that?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Talyen42 8y ago

While it was a great deal, I don't like to use services that change the rules every 24 hours, so I canceled my subscription.

sp332 8y ago
That's why I cancelled mine too. I am grateful to them for pouring millions of dollars into letting people see more movies, and proving that people really are interested in seeing movies if only they were less overpriced. AMC at least got the message and is starting their own subscription service. Hopefully other theaters will take notice.
finaliteration 8y ago
This is why I haven’t even bothered to sign up, as much as I love going to the movies. I don’t really want to spend money on something that may not be worth as much the following day. I’m pretty sure that’s just called investing.
- verletx64 8y ago
  Why not just cancel it when the terms become unfavourable? You're just losing out this way.
yalogin 8y ago
I don’t get it. It’s still a great deal, unless the deal is a net negative to you why do you care? You must see that the initial deal was too generous and unsustainable right?
- sp332 8y ago
  Some days it's a great deal. Some days they don't let you see the movie you wanted, or you have to pay 8 extra dollars, or they run out of money and half of the methods of buying tickets stop working. Each with less than 24 hours notice. Yeah it's unsustainable and I was planning to unsubscribe when they raised their prices. Instead I cancelled when they started jerking users around. Well, after the 3rd or 4th time.

ulkesh 8y ago

It was a horrible service in the beginning and it still is. It won't matter how much it changes hands. You cannot ask a customer to pay money, commit to a contract (they required this in the early days), and then limit their use in various ways. In the beginning, you could see one movie per day which was great, but you couldn't share the account with your spouse, you couldn't use multiple devices, and you couldn't see the same movie twice if I am remembering correctly. And that was when it was $30/month (albeit a cheap price if able to take true advantage of the movie-watching). And now they're changing the terms, seemingly on a weekly basis. It has been a complete failure throughout its run. It's time for MoviePass to go away.

nyrulez 8y ago
I find your message hilarious. Do you have better alternatives if you're calling this horrible?
- morsch 8y ago
  Netflix
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    > 3.4. Changes to the Price and Subscription Plans. We reserve the right to change our subscription plans or adjust pricing for our service or any components thereof in any manner and at any time as we may determine in our sole and absolute discretion. Except as otherwise expressly provided for in these Terms of Use, any price changes or changes to your subscription plan will take effect following notice to you. And there is a forced arbitration clause (and as much as I think those are a mockery of our legal system), this would seem to allow fairly substantial changes at any time.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Yeah, except for the fact that historically they have never pulled any crap approaching the ongoing drama that is MoviePass. The biggest shift I recall is the move to split the DVD/streaming services, which I think was completely reasonable.

mc32 8y ago

I don’t watch movies, so i don’t demand characteristics, but why not have several tiers at diff price points?

michaelt 8y ago
If their business model relies on people paying but not going (a business model some gyms use) they want the low-attending people on the most expensive plan possible. Offering cheaper tiers would prevent that.

k1ns 8y ago

I might be uneducated about the issue as a whole, but I don't really see the negative side to this service. $10/month for 3 viewings per month. That's 3 movies for the price of 0.76 movies where I'm from (last time I went tickets were $13). Then, after you hit that cap, extra viewings are $5 less per ticket which has to be less than any one movie ticket for any new feature anywhere in America. Am I missing something? Are they just getting hate because they lacked foresight in the beginning? Is it because they gambled with investor money on a ridiculous business model? I have a genuine curiosity around where the hate is coming from. I don't like going to movie theaters but if I did I would think this was a great deal. EDIT: to correct the misinformation that each additional ticket was $5

untog 8y ago
It is a great deal. The problem is that MoviePass persisted for so long with a model that made no financial sense whatsoever, and now their customers have gotten used to it. There's no way to sell this as anything other than a giant downgrade.
- ProAm 8y ago
  > MoviePass persisted for so long with a model that made no financial sense whatsoever You can say that about almost every start up discussed on HN
  - cm2012 8y ago
    That's not really true. MoviePass is an outlier in its crazy business model that loses money on every customer. Most other start-ups just have high cap ex but make marginal profits per sale.
    - jrs95 8y ago
      Funny enough I worked at a ecommerce clothing “startup” that had upwards of $75 million in sales but wasn’t profitable

edgarvaldes 8y ago

In the threads about privacy, it is common to read some comments that propose to exchange your information for some benefit. MoviePass indicates that this is not as easy as it seems.

bena 8y ago

Weird, it's almost like theaters were charging what they charge for actual reasons rather than "corporate greed".

apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
Er... the actual cost of someone going to the theater is irrelevant here. The only cost that matters is what the theaters are charging since that is what MoviePass has to cover. If they can't cover that, they can't provide their service. It doesn't matter if the theater is charging $3 or $30 per ticket; if MoviePass cannot, at a bare minimum, cover that cost, they cannot continue their service. Which is what happened two weekends ago when their service was briefly shut down due to failed payments until they took out an emergency $5M loan to cover things.
- bena 8y ago
  > the actual cost of someone going to the theater is irrelevant here. The only cost that matters is what the theaters are charging since that is what MoviePass has to cover. These two things are tied. A theater is not going to give a discount it can't give. The theaters will not sell a ticket at a loss just because MoviePass is asking for 100 tickets at a time. MoviePass thought they could leverage being the source of a lot of sales into getting discounts from theater chains. But theaters are simply telling MoviePass that the prices are what they are. They make money elsewhere. Investing more into MoviePass really seems like throwing good money after bad.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wild_preference 8y ago
This sort of sarcasm obfuscates your message. Frankly I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Surely it’s best to just come out and say it without the noncommittal “it’s almost as if” deflection.
- bena 8y ago

amf12 8y ago

I don't understand why they did not also raise the cost to something like $15 a month. $10 was too low in my opinion. I assumed they might increase it to $15 sometime later, which is still a good deal for consumers, if you consider the average cost to be $9

passivepinetree 8y ago
Where do you live that the average cost of a movie ticket is only $9? I’ve seen tickets fully twice that expensive at AMCs in San Francisco.
- potlee 8y ago
  I hope you know San Francisco is an expensive place
  - monksy 8y ago
    $18 at the Regal near me for "RPX" (aka premium times) in Chicago.
  - maccard 8y ago
    I live somewhere much cheaper than SF, and tickets are regularly £10-£11 (which is about $15 give or take)
  - jonknee 8y ago
    But Movie Pass charges the same amount no matter where you live so you'd expect it to be much more popular in expensive places. It would be challenging to come up with a worse business model than Movie Pass.
- amf12 8y ago
  Try small towns, college towns, middle of nowhere.

laken 8y ago

I switched from MoviePass last week to AMC's MoviePass rebuttal, called AMC A-List. The AMC program is $20/month, for three movies a week, in any format, with online advanced-booking. With this change, I don't see why MoviePass subscribers would not just switch to A-List if their main theatre is an AMC.

idbehold 8y ago
Perhaps because it's twice the price.
- laken 8y ago
  Yes, although among my circles of MoviePass-using friends, many had been paying over $20/month recently with various MoviePass upcharges. And MoviePass also still doesn't allow movies that haven't been in the theatres for at least two weeks, no formats other than standard, and annoying $4 surge charges for some showings.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Twice the price for four times as many movies, without blackouts, but only from one theater chain. And there's a better chance that the rules won't change next week.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Yeah but you actually get to see movies you want to see... lately this is looking a hell of a lot cheaper than MoviePass' "pay us $10 to see nothing" offering.
jackmodern 8y ago
Stubs A-List is leaps and bounds better than moviepass, the extra $10 is really negligible as well. Being able to book seats days in advance through an app that isn't actively trying to screw you over with GPS limitations is just so nice. The cost of one imax ticket at the metreon more than covers A-List too. It's really a great deal.
kardos 8y ago

empath75 8y ago

> “Because only 15 percent of MoviePass members see four or more movies a month, we expect that the new subscription model will have no impact whatsoever on over 85 percent of our subscribers.” Is it the same 15% seeing 4 movies a month? I suspect not.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

This is fine. There's barely 3 good movies released per month .

ryantuck 8y ago

One thing I am struggling to understand is why MoviePass is paying theaters full price for tickets, essentially needing to take on the same economics as an insurance company. If I'm a theater, I'm incentivized to put butts in seats and make my markup on concessions. If MoviePass is helping to put lots of butts in otherwise empty seats, I imagine I'd be willing to provide tickets to MoviePass at a discounted rate. I'm not sure how much that helps MoviePass's bottom line, but my initial guess is that it would be nontrivial. What don't I understand about the incentives and economics here?

cwyers 8y ago
Because the theaters don't need MoviePass to offer discounts? They can offer discounts directly to the consumers. MoviePass is an intermediary to the transaction that offers no value and tries to consume value.
- dwild 8y ago
  > They can offer discounts directly to the consumers. I offer discount at my company, will you takes it? Why no one is taking it? Marketing is the reason. It's great to have a discount but at the end of the day, you still need to promote that discount. Promoting to a market that's not yours, a market that you don't know and you don't even want to deal with (cheap ass consumer), doesn't make sense. MoviePass is the king of cheap ass market, they know how to reach them, they know how to make money out of them and you literally have NOTHING to invest to get that market. That's the value of MoviePass. You just take their client...
emsy 8y ago
I don’t know about the US, but I talked with a someone who runs a cinema in Germany and he said that for example Disney dictates the prices, leaving him with small margins. This is also the reason why they have to sell a certain amount of drinks and popcorn (at a high price point) to stay afloat.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  If they continue like this cinemas will just die out. My local cinema however is offering a "Sneak Preview" on Mondays. For 5€ you get to see some (unknown on ticket purchase) new movie that people have actually put some effort into (non "block busters", a.k.a. transformers part 500). There I have seen Shape of Water, Hotel Artemis and Searching. I will see another one this evening. With adaptions like these maybe they'll survive a bit longer. I certainly enjoy the offering.

pg_bot 8y ago

I don't understand why MoviePass doesn't just close up shop. Their popularity stemmed from selling a dollar for 50 cents. There is no business here, they should quit while they are behind.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
Arrogance.

Accacin 8y ago

The price seems fine, I'd be happy with it. The problem I have is the amount of tracking they're apparently doing. That's the bit that makes me not use the service (not that I can in my country, but my point still stands).

evanelias 8y ago

At the moment, Google is displaying MoviePass's parent company's market cap as only $189K [1]. Yahoo Finance is showing an even lower number, $141K [2]. If these numbers are accurate, that's pretty astounding -- if you buy $2000 of shares on the public market, you'd own over 1% of the company! That said, I can't imagine they're actually correct, given the share volumes changing hands. Finance apps seem to have trouble with stock splits, share buybacks, post-IPO equity offerings and the like... is there no good data source for number of shares outstanding of a company? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:HMNY https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:HMNY [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HMNY?p=HMNY https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HMNY?p=HMNY

schintan 8y ago
Bloomberg shows it as 542K, which I believe is fairly accurate.
mikestew 8y ago
You won't be able to buy $2000 worth of HMNY without driving the price up (EDIT: maybe not, at 350MM shares traded as of this morning; who the hell is trading this turd?). Then when reality kicks in and the price drops back down, you're sitting on shares even more worthless than they were today at $0.06. I mean, if you think you can turn it around, go for it. Some folks on HN could pay for it out of petty cash.
swarnie_ 8y ago
Its also a fantastic way to lose $2000. This company is dead, no questions about it.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  It would be a fantastic gamble. With gambling comes the chance to lose a lot of money, but also a small chance to win a lot of money. I currently own around 2500 shares of HMNY, and it is a 100% gamble. I'm hoping someone better acquires them, or they bring in a better management team. But I dropped a total of $450 on these shares, so if I make $500, my gamble paid off. This company isn't invest-able, but it is gamble-able.

hypersoar 8y ago

I see a lot of people saying that $10 for 3 movies/month still sounds like a pretty good deal. It might be, but there are loads of other issues that make it more expensive and less useable: - They recently added surcharges for what they call "peak pricing". When I looked at showtimes a couple Sundays ago, every showing after 10:00am had a $6-$8 surcharge. - Some showtimes just aren't available. After seeing all those surcharges, I tried again the next day. There were no extra fees, but the showings between 6pm and 8pm were not shown in the app. And this was for non-blockbusters that have been out for 2-4 weeks. - Their CEO has said (in a way that hasn't really been communicated to users) that they're no longer going to offer tickets for new mainstream movies. It's not at all clear which movies will be included. - The service has gone down a couple times in the last couple of weeks because they ran out of money to pay for tickets. There's no way to know ahead of time if the app will actually work when you get to the theater (and you can't buy tickets before then unless you go to the theater earlier on the same day). So, it's not $10/month for 3 movies. It's $10/month for 3 movies, excluding new films, with likely surcharges on weekends and many convenient showtimes blacked out. Also, sometimes it doesn't work.

nodja 8y ago
Read the article. > The company says the newly updated plans will include “many” major first run films from studios, wording that appears to confirm MoviePass’ plans to limit access to certain blockbusters, a trend that began with the latest Mission: Impossible film. For the time being, however, it’s agreed to suspend Peak Pricing and Ticket Verification to help appease existing users who are migrated over to the new plan. To me it sounds they're removing peak pricing and being more conscious about restricting movies.
- cwyers 8y ago
  > To me it sounds they're removing peak pricing and being more conscious about restricting movies. Until they aren't. MoviePass changes the deal way too often to have any certainty except about one thing: the deal gets worse all the time. As a customer, you have to try and guess what the value prop is going to be later on after the next round of changes.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

I bought a yearly 70ish dollar package from them and I feel like I've been robbed of the product that I paid upfront for. However I've seen 25ish movies with my movie pass so I guess I've made my money back but it's still very frustrating. Their CS is so poor too.

jermaustin1 8y ago
You feel robbed that you saw around 25 movies for less than $3 each?
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  I felt robbed that I paid for a product and then the product I received was different than what I paid for. A lot of the 25 movies I wouldnt actually have seen if I had to pay full price. If I went to a restaurant and ordered a BLT, paid, and then a two slices of bread with bacon came out. I'd be disappointed even though I like bacon... I didnt receive what I paid upfront for. Even if I got something I will still feel like I was taken advantage of. Adding on the fast that when I would ask the waiter/waitress why I didnt receive what I paid for and a refund I'd be ignored...

cheeyoonlee 8y ago

I've always used and now plan to stick with Sinemia. Advanced ticketing through any online site like Fandango, works at any theater, works for 3D/4DX/IMAX/premium formats. It's still limited to 3 movies a month but for the price and all these "better" features it's definitely worth it for me and the girlfriend. Here's the thing though, Sinemia stuck with these features and pricing model from the start so it made sense financially for them and was still a great deal. At this point MoviePass seems like they're clinging for life and all my peers on their plan express frustration every time these frequent changes occur. I'd like to link my referral code but I think their own signup offerings are better -

cheeze 8y ago
Sinemia is so much better it's insane! I feel bad for my friends when we go to movies and they use MoviePass. Seems like they have so many restrictions, whereas I can just buy tix online whenever to _any_ showing.

rongenre 8y ago

I cancelled this weekend: surcharge for a two-week old not-exactly-blockbuster was annoying, but meh. On Saturday, the app listed a theater showing something I wanted to see, I drove there, and then... couldn't check in and was no longer listed when I refreshed the theater. I'd expect them to keep playing this kind of game.