10 ms·

Last year, I bought a MoviePass t-shirt from the company’s merch site in anticipation of just this event. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. But more seriously, as

Last year, I bought a MoviePass t-shirt from the company’s merch site in anticipation of just this event. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. But more seriously, as someone who has followed MoviePass since 2011 (I was even on a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival with the OG founder/CEO, something I forgot about until I found a photo of myself on Getty doing a Google search), I’m sad that a startup that probably wasn’t ever going to work flamed our this way, backed by a penny stock company that has all the hallmarks of being involved in something really unsavory (I’m not saying Helios & Matheson are con artists or involved in some sort of money laundering scheme; I’m just saying I understand why people might ask that question). The truth is, the MoviePass model would never work without partnership with the theater chains (and possibly studios — tho that’s gets a little tricker b/c of the Paramount Decree), and even then, that would only be temporary. Even without Ted and Mitch intentionally trolling the theater chains, AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands, rather than paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty. Stacy Spikes, The MoviePass founder and CEO (who was replaced as CEO before the $10 plan launched and was then unceremoniously fired) is a great guy. I was glad to read even all of this insanity has helped him raise money for his next thing. As for the other clowns, well, I’m thankful for the year plus of entertainment.

seltzered_ 7y ago
I love how you collect shirts of failed companies & wear em on msdn shows, it’s like a underhanded memento mori of sorts.
- pchristensen 7y ago
  The Groupon office lobby had a picture of Andrew Mason on the cover of a magazine, surrounded by magazine covers of famous dotcom meltdowns. I always loved that. Well, that and the cat UFO. See https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060000-480-320.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060..., https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#theres-groupon-cofounder-and-ceo-andrew-masons-recent-forbes-cover-in-the-middle-surrounded-by-magazine-covers-of-famous-dotcom-meltdowns-like-myspace-netscape-and-aol-this-is-how-mason-keeps-himself-grounded-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#...
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  Thank you for noticing! Honestly, I like to be subversive (because if I can, why not!), and I also genuinely think it is a good thing to remember that as you allude, "we all die" or more to the point, "no company/product/language/technology is guaranteed a forever."
  - fortran77 7y ago
    Thanks for reminding me! I think I'll get a Rust T-Shirt and save it for a few years. It'll be like the "Oberon" T-Shirt I still have.
WorldMaker 7y ago
> AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands, rather than paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty. Yeah, from the start MoviePass reminded me directly of that quote attributed to Steve Jobs (about Dropbox) that the company was a "feature", not a product.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Reedx 7y ago
  Except Dropbox is now a 12 year old company. So I don't see how that was insightful? It reminds me of The Sharks saying "a product is not a company". It's a virtually meaningless statement.
  - ses1984 7y ago
    Dropbox market cap is crazy and they are trying to pivot to something else like paper.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Are they profitable? Despite what the techno digerati have you believe, a successful company is not based on how the market values it but whether they can get people to give them more money than it costs to produce a good or service. There is no better evidence that Dropbox is just a feature than for the same price that Dropbox charges for 1Tb of storage, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite for up to six users and a total of 6TB of storage.
    - wgerard 7y ago
      Just as a caveat, I have 0 affiliation with Dropbox (I don't think I even know anyone who works there). > Are they profitable? Profitability isn't the end-all metric for a company. Amazon famously circles around the profitable/not-profitable line frequently and few people have doubts about Amazon's viability as a company. Dropbox reported ~20% growth in revenue YoY and seems to have dumped most of that into R&D (you can see their R&D costs have grown by nearly as much as their revenue has). Other operating expenses remain mostly the same. > There is no better evidence that Dropbox is just a feature than for the same price that Dropbox charges for 1Tb of storage, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite for up to six users and a total of 6TB of storage. Ok, but a growing subset of people clearly choose Dropbox. There are huge advantages to being a first mover that are sometimes insurmountable, even for gigantic companies. The zune was in many ways "superior" to the iPod, but we all know how that story ended.
codesushi42 7y ago
I have an Uber T-shirt if you're interested.
- objektif 7y ago
  Shots fired. Its not unbelievable tbh.
  - chx 7y ago
    Depends. If they lose to AB5, it's immediately over. You see, Uber is not a cab company masquerading as a tech company. No, it has become the latest attempt in a very long list of various form of attempts to essentially roll back the New Deal, undo all the progress organized labor made. Recommended reading: Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein, this covers the first few decades closing with Reagan (and almost starting with him, too). https://www.wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393337662-invisible-hands-f4184038-84b9-40b1-a06f-54a7867e2157 https://www.wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393337662-invisible-han... If you consider it from that angle, then pouring billions into it is not that much of an investment. But if AB5 forces Uber to make their drivers employees then the "gig economy" is practically over and with it, Uber as well.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      Or, it could just be a perfectly natural market response to blatant regulatory capture and customer abuse on the part of the incumbent taxicab industry.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        The problem is that it's both.
      - chx 7y ago
        > natural market response with 5.2B quarterly loss and no path to profitability, natural market, sure, sure.
SilasX 7y ago
>But more seriously, as someone who has followed MoviePass since 2011 I was confused and had to look up the history[1], because I thought they were only around since August 2017 [2]. As it turns out, 2017 was when they shifted over to the "one movie a day for $9.95 a month" (paid for at the retail level with no special buy-in or discounts from theaters), which is what made them a household name. So, just an FYI if were confused like me. Someone else probably has more details about the clusterfrak regarding all the sudden blackout days and surge pricing and running out of money and denying your ticket after you got to the theater. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass [2] which I remember I was visiting my brother when I started hearing about it
dontbenebby 7y ago
> Last year, I bought a MoviePass t-shirt from the company’s merch site in anticipation of just this event. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. You can probably sell it to the HBO prop dept for next season of Silicon Valley for $$$$$
- SilasX 7y ago
  In what context would they want to have a character wearing swag from a defunct startup? (I've only seen up to midway through season 3 btw.)
  - travisjungroth 7y ago
    Wouldn’t have to be a plot point. Could just be a funny in-joke for the right character.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      But which existing character and joke?
      - dontbenebby 7y ago
        Probably the guy with the car and the doors. He can give more "wisdom" like this "wisdom" while wearing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (To be clear the joke is he's a moron but everyone listens to him because he has money)
- 27182818284 7y ago
  Apropos this shutdown, Silicon Valley is also shutting down and its last season is slated to premier October 27, 2019.
  - dontbenebby 7y ago
    I was interning at Mozilla the summer it premiered and watched the S1 finale in a bar in SF... it was harder than you'd think to find a spot. Apparently it hit a little too hard with some folks :)
dmix 7y ago
> AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands This ignores countless counter-examples where entrenched companies completely missed the boat, despite plenty of time and obvious advantages. Although I understand how people could think this, it's how most business is taught to people for some reason but price competition and existing prior competitors (surprisingly) doesn't matter nearly as much in the disruption game as they do among big businesses in stable markets. But people tend to serve business advice as one-size-fits-all. This seems to be more about the weird nature of the film marketplace than matters of competitive advantage.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  Undoubtedly just how bad MoviePass's business model sans cooperation from the theater chains (who would eventually just do their own thing) is partially unique to the film exhibition marketplace -- but I wasn't making a sweeping statement about all businesses or disruption, I was talking about the actual MoviePass business model which would never ever ever ever work without cooperation with the theater chains (or, as I said, studios. But the studios are difficult because of the Paramount Decree). I don't claim to be an expert at many things and I'm far from the smartest person in the room, but MoviePass hits my sweet spot because it encompasses the two industries I've studied/spent my career/life around, and the math for MoviePass just never works out. Initially, the goal was to buy discounted tickets or have partnerships with the theater chains. The theater chains balked and refused to work with MoviePass, which led to the hack of using a pre-paid credit card and buying tickets at RETAIL prices. AMC and MoviePass actually did have a partnership at one point (2015) in a few select cities but if anything, all that partnership did was give AMC the data it needed to know how it could create its own service. MoviePass thought it could leverage the theaters by claiming it was responsible for a large percentage of box office traffic -- but all its data really did was show that people really liked spending $10 a month to see unlimited movies. None of MoviePass's attempts to show that it was a market maker in terms of pushing subscribers towards a certain film worked (it didn't help that the films that studios were willing to advertise via MoviePass were often not very good) and MoviePass's brief sojourn as a film financier/distributor itself basically encompassed Gotti starring John Travolta (a truly bad film that no other major studio would distribute -- it should have gone straight-to-video/streaming/whatever -- which was the original plan. The producers literally bought it back from Lionsgate b/c Lionsgate smartly realized it was not worth spending money on putting in theaters), which was a flop -- and to add insult to injury, a flop whose audience was almost entirely MoviePass subscribers (meaning MoviePass basically paid for the film twice). Again, I'm not making any larger statements about disruption. But this business, in this industry (which it should be noted, has fairly inflexible pricing and the theater chains themselves are largely only profitable because of concessions), with this ridiculous business plan was never, ever, ever going to work. And even if Regal and AMC had partnered with MoviePass, Regal and AMc would just have taken those lessons and launched their own loyalty subscription services.
parsimo2010 7y ago
I think buying swag from startups to sell after they fail would be a better business model than the moviepass model. This was a classic case of, “we lose money on every sale, so we’re dropping prices to make up for it in volume.” EVERYONE knew this was a bad idea, but enough B.S. thrown into a slide deck convinced enough investors that this was a smart gamble and not a clearly dumb one. Maybe the insiders knew something that everyone else didn’t, or maybe they were pitching a quick exit, or possibly just lying to their investors. Maybe in a parallel universe they pulled it off. But I’m still thinking how cool it would be to have a collection on vintage/retro T-shirts from failed startups. You could even have a subscription plan if it got big enough, or you could buy “options” from startups to buy their remaining swag for a discount if they ever went under.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  > I think buying swag from startups to sell after they fail would be a better business model than the moviepass model. I wish somebody would start fuckedcompany.com v2.0. I used to hit that site every day. Good times.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - filmgirlcw 7y ago
    I bought theranos.online last year for basically this purpose. It sits unused but I want to either have a fuckedcompany 2.0 type of thing or just sell assorted fucked company adjacent shirts.
  - _jal 7y ago
    I still occasionally wear my fuckedcompany.com T-shirt. It is in the "laundry shirt" stage, headed towards the "you must like that shirt a lot" stage. Facial reactions to it tell me who was there at the time.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      And the SFW "luckedcompany.com" with the same backend but different theme.
adrianmonk 7y ago
> MoviePass t-shirt [ .. ] wear it tomorrow. Hah, I did this with my Amiga t-shirt the day Commodore went bankrupt. (Except for the part about buying the shirt it in anticipation of bankruptcy.)
koolba 7y ago
What’s the Paramount Decree? EDIT: Ah there’s a SCOTUS case that would prevent them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  It's supposed to prevent studios from owning exhibitors. The one addition I'd add to your Wikipedia link, is that in the 80s, deregulation weakened many parts of the Paramount Decree, which is why you saw scenarios in the 90s/00s like Sony (a studio, thanks to its purchase of Columbia Tri-Star), also owning a theater chain (Loews, once stylized Sony Loews). Slightly related -- the United States v. Loews case [1], which bans block booking, would make movie bundling difficult for a MoviePass like company too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Loew%27s_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Loew%27s_Inc.
rbobby 7y ago
> paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty Is chain loyalty a thing with movie theaters though? Don't people decide what movie to watch and then pick a theater? At best I think that in locations with lots of choices (> 2) there may be a specific theater a customer doesn't like. But even then... how many customers are there that will absolutely refuse to go to theater X even if it means missing out on "super amazing film Y"? I wonder if the real problem was that MoviePass's main demographic might have been people looking to go to the movies on the cheap. These folks aren't buying popcorn, candy, and pop... the main (only?) profit center for theaters. In the end all that's been accomplished is filling seats at a loss (or minimal profit).

seltzered_ 7y ago

I love how you collect shirts of failed companies & wear em on msdn shows, it’s like a underhanded memento mori of sorts.

pchristensen 7y ago
The Groupon office lobby had a picture of Andrew Mason on the cover of a magazine, surrounded by magazine covers of famous dotcom meltdowns. I always loved that. Well, that and the cat UFO. See https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060000-480-320.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060..., https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#theres-groupon-cofounder-and-ceo-andrew-masons-recent-forbes-cover-in-the-middle-surrounded-by-magazine-covers-of-famous-dotcom-meltdowns-like-myspace-netscape-and-aol-this-is-how-mason-keeps-himself-grounded-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#...
filmgirlcw 7y ago
Thank you for noticing! Honestly, I like to be subversive (because if I can, why not!), and I also genuinely think it is a good thing to remember that as you allude, "we all die" or more to the point, "no company/product/language/technology is guaranteed a forever."
- fortran77 7y ago
  Thanks for reminding me! I think I'll get a Rust T-Shirt and save it for a few years. It'll be like the "Oberon" T-Shirt I still have.

WorldMaker 7y ago

> AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands, rather than paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty. Yeah, from the start MoviePass reminded me directly of that quote attributed to Steve Jobs (about Dropbox) that the company was a "feature", not a product.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Reedx 7y ago
Except Dropbox is now a 12 year old company. So I don't see how that was insightful? It reminds me of The Sharks saying "a product is not a company". It's a virtually meaningless statement.
- ses1984 7y ago
  Dropbox market cap is crazy and they are trying to pivot to something else like paper.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Are they profitable? Despite what the techno digerati have you believe, a successful company is not based on how the market values it but whether they can get people to give them more money than it costs to produce a good or service. There is no better evidence that Dropbox is just a feature than for the same price that Dropbox charges for 1Tb of storage, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite for up to six users and a total of 6TB of storage.
  - wgerard 7y ago
    Just as a caveat, I have 0 affiliation with Dropbox (I don't think I even know anyone who works there). > Are they profitable? Profitability isn't the end-all metric for a company. Amazon famously circles around the profitable/not-profitable line frequently and few people have doubts about Amazon's viability as a company. Dropbox reported ~20% growth in revenue YoY and seems to have dumped most of that into R&D (you can see their R&D costs have grown by nearly as much as their revenue has). Other operating expenses remain mostly the same. > There is no better evidence that Dropbox is just a feature than for the same price that Dropbox charges for 1Tb of storage, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite for up to six users and a total of 6TB of storage. Ok, but a growing subset of people clearly choose Dropbox. There are huge advantages to being a first mover that are sometimes insurmountable, even for gigantic companies. The zune was in many ways "superior" to the iPod, but we all know how that story ended.

codesushi42 7y ago

I have an Uber T-shirt if you're interested.

objektif 7y ago
Shots fired. Its not unbelievable tbh.
- chx 7y ago
  Depends. If they lose to AB5, it's immediately over. You see, Uber is not a cab company masquerading as a tech company. No, it has become the latest attempt in a very long list of various form of attempts to essentially roll back the New Deal, undo all the progress organized labor made. Recommended reading: Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein, this covers the first few decades closing with Reagan (and almost starting with him, too). https://www.wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393337662-invisible-hands-f4184038-84b9-40b1-a06f-54a7867e2157 https://www.wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393337662-invisible-han... If you consider it from that angle, then pouring billions into it is not that much of an investment. But if AB5 forces Uber to make their drivers employees then the "gig economy" is practically over and with it, Uber as well.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    Or, it could just be a perfectly natural market response to blatant regulatory capture and customer abuse on the part of the incumbent taxicab industry.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      The problem is that it's both.
    - chx 7y ago
      > natural market response with 5.2B quarterly loss and no path to profitability, natural market, sure, sure.

SilasX 7y ago

>But more seriously, as someone who has followed MoviePass since 2011 I was confused and had to look up the history[1], because I thought they were only around since August 2017 [2]. As it turns out, 2017 was when they shifted over to the "one movie a day for $9.95 a month" (paid for at the retail level with no special buy-in or discounts from theaters), which is what made them a household name. So, just an FYI if were confused like me. Someone else probably has more details about the clusterfrak regarding all the sudden blackout days and surge pricing and running out of money and denying your ticket after you got to the theater. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass [2] which I remember I was visiting my brother when I started hearing about it

dontbenebby 7y ago

> Last year, I bought a MoviePass t-shirt from the company’s merch site in anticipation of just this event. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. You can probably sell it to the HBO prop dept for next season of Silicon Valley for $$$$$

SilasX 7y ago
In what context would they want to have a character wearing swag from a defunct startup? (I've only seen up to midway through season 3 btw.)
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  Wouldn’t have to be a plot point. Could just be a funny in-joke for the right character.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    But which existing character and joke?
    - dontbenebby 7y ago
      Probably the guy with the car and the doors. He can give more "wisdom" like this "wisdom" while wearing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (To be clear the joke is he's a moron but everyone listens to him because he has money)
27182818284 7y ago
Apropos this shutdown, Silicon Valley is also shutting down and its last season is slated to premier October 27, 2019.
- dontbenebby 7y ago
  I was interning at Mozilla the summer it premiered and watched the S1 finale in a bar in SF... it was harder than you'd think to find a spot. Apparently it hit a little too hard with some folks :)

dmix 7y ago

> AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands This ignores countless counter-examples where entrenched companies completely missed the boat, despite plenty of time and obvious advantages. Although I understand how people could think this, it's how most business is taught to people for some reason but price competition and existing prior competitors (surprisingly) doesn't matter nearly as much in the disruption game as they do among big businesses in stable markets. But people tend to serve business advice as one-size-fits-all. This seems to be more about the weird nature of the film marketplace than matters of competitive advantage.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
Undoubtedly just how bad MoviePass's business model sans cooperation from the theater chains (who would eventually just do their own thing) is partially unique to the film exhibition marketplace -- but I wasn't making a sweeping statement about all businesses or disruption, I was talking about the actual MoviePass business model which would never ever ever ever work without cooperation with the theater chains (or, as I said, studios. But the studios are difficult because of the Paramount Decree). I don't claim to be an expert at many things and I'm far from the smartest person in the room, but MoviePass hits my sweet spot because it encompasses the two industries I've studied/spent my career/life around, and the math for MoviePass just never works out. Initially, the goal was to buy discounted tickets or have partnerships with the theater chains. The theater chains balked and refused to work with MoviePass, which led to the hack of using a pre-paid credit card and buying tickets at RETAIL prices. AMC and MoviePass actually did have a partnership at one point (2015) in a few select cities but if anything, all that partnership did was give AMC the data it needed to know how it could create its own service. MoviePass thought it could leverage the theaters by claiming it was responsible for a large percentage of box office traffic -- but all its data really did was show that people really liked spending $10 a month to see unlimited movies. None of MoviePass's attempts to show that it was a market maker in terms of pushing subscribers towards a certain film worked (it didn't help that the films that studios were willing to advertise via MoviePass were often not very good) and MoviePass's brief sojourn as a film financier/distributor itself basically encompassed Gotti starring John Travolta (a truly bad film that no other major studio would distribute -- it should have gone straight-to-video/streaming/whatever -- which was the original plan. The producers literally bought it back from Lionsgate b/c Lionsgate smartly realized it was not worth spending money on putting in theaters), which was a flop -- and to add insult to injury, a flop whose audience was almost entirely MoviePass subscribers (meaning MoviePass basically paid for the film twice). Again, I'm not making any larger statements about disruption. But this business, in this industry (which it should be noted, has fairly inflexible pricing and the theater chains themselves are largely only profitable because of concessions), with this ridiculous business plan was never, ever, ever going to work. And even if Regal and AMC had partnered with MoviePass, Regal and AMc would just have taken those lessons and launched their own loyalty subscription services.

parsimo2010 7y ago

I think buying swag from startups to sell after they fail would be a better business model than the moviepass model. This was a classic case of, “we lose money on every sale, so we’re dropping prices to make up for it in volume.” EVERYONE knew this was a bad idea, but enough B.S. thrown into a slide deck convinced enough investors that this was a smart gamble and not a clearly dumb one. Maybe the insiders knew something that everyone else didn’t, or maybe they were pitching a quick exit, or possibly just lying to their investors. Maybe in a parallel universe they pulled it off. But I’m still thinking how cool it would be to have a collection on vintage/retro T-shirts from failed startups. You could even have a subscription plan if it got big enough, or you could buy “options” from startups to buy their remaining swag for a discount if they ever went under.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
> I think buying swag from startups to sell after they fail would be a better business model than the moviepass model. I wish somebody would start fuckedcompany.com v2.0. I used to hit that site every day. Good times.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  I bought theranos.online last year for basically this purpose. It sits unused but I want to either have a fuckedcompany 2.0 type of thing or just sell assorted fucked company adjacent shirts.
- _jal 7y ago
  I still occasionally wear my fuckedcompany.com T-shirt. It is in the "laundry shirt" stage, headed towards the "you must like that shirt a lot" stage. Facial reactions to it tell me who was there at the time.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    And the SFW "luckedcompany.com" with the same backend but different theme.

adrianmonk 7y ago

> MoviePass t-shirt [ .. ] wear it tomorrow. Hah, I did this with my Amiga t-shirt the day Commodore went bankrupt. (Except for the part about buying the shirt it in anticipation of bankruptcy.)

koolba 7y ago

What’s the Paramount Decree? EDIT: Ah there’s a SCOTUS case that would prevent them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....

filmgirlcw 7y ago
It's supposed to prevent studios from owning exhibitors. The one addition I'd add to your Wikipedia link, is that in the 80s, deregulation weakened many parts of the Paramount Decree, which is why you saw scenarios in the 90s/00s like Sony (a studio, thanks to its purchase of Columbia Tri-Star), also owning a theater chain (Loews, once stylized Sony Loews). Slightly related -- the United States v. Loews case [1], which bans block booking, would make movie bundling difficult for a MoviePass like company too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Loew%27s_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Loew%27s_Inc.

rbobby 7y ago

> paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty Is chain loyalty a thing with movie theaters though? Don't people decide what movie to watch and then pick a theater? At best I think that in locations with lots of choices (> 2) there may be a specific theater a customer doesn't like. But even then... how many customers are there that will absolutely refuse to go to theater X even if it means missing out on "super amazing film Y"? I wonder if the real problem was that MoviePass's main demographic might have been people looking to go to the movies on the cheap. These folks aren't buying popcorn, candy, and pop... the main (only?) profit center for theaters. In the end all that's been accomplished is filling seats at a loss (or minimal profit).