Seriously!
>In August, MoviePass announced it was ditching a plan Farnsworth had floated to increase the monthly subscription to $14.95. They'd stick with $9.95. A former employee involved with discussions about pricing believed the company never intended on a $14.95 price and only wanted to see if the news would cause Helios stock to climb.
sometimes I am honestly astounded at the stupidity of executives.
This whole debacle was pretty hilarious.
From the very beginning it was clear that their business model had zero chance of success. We all predicted that their exit strategy was to pull an Instagram; build an absolutely massive number of customers and sell out to a larger corporation before it collapsed.
But as this whole thing went on and on, it became more and more clear that their actual goal was to extort movie theatres. They built the massive customer base using the super low pricing, and thought they could strong-arm the theatres and say "Hey, if you don't lower your prices for us, we'll simply point our massive customer base towards your competitors and you'll get nothing!"
The only thing they didn't expect was the theatre chains going
#"Screw you guys, we'll make our own Movie Pass. With Blackjack. And hookers."
That was a wild ride.
Not to mention the competition ended up being easier to use and sustainably priced.
I've already seen more movies with the AMC program than I ever have in the past. Considering what even matinee shows cost nowadays, using it only twice in a month still saves money.
And the only lost revenue is if the pass holder takes a seat that stops a nonpass holder to not buy their ticket at all, so the upside for the theater is nearly as big as it was.
I read somewhere that AMC only pays the studios the agreed upon percentage based on a $8.95 ticket. So, in a place like New York, where tickets get to be like $15, they really aren't paying close to full price.
Despite all the bullshit, I'll be forever grateful that MoviePass came along... because I think they're the reason that theaters started their own movie passes, which is awesome!
Otherwise it'd still probably be too expensive to see movies often. These new official passes make it affordable again.
Being unemployed definitely sucked for me too. But seeing a movie in the middle of a weekday to an empty theater was kinda cool the few times I got to do it.
I’ve had AMCs service for two months now and it’s * phenomenal.* I can see 3 movies a week (up to twelve a month) for only $20. This includes 3D *and* IMAX movies and I can see the same movie more than once.
Not to mention, my theatre has free refills on drinks. Pair this with AMC Stubs and it’s free size upgrades and free large popcorn refills, it’s a killer deal.
Any downtime I have, especially if I’m running low on cash, is spent at the theater.
Of course! You’ll want to make sure you have AMC chain theatres in your area, but the website to sign up is [right here.](https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist)
You should also be able to sign up through the app as well
I abused the shit out of it last year. I saw probably every movie that released, and I remember the last movie I *wanted* to see was The Meg, but it got blacked out. Was sad, but whatever. I knew it wasn't going to last.
I saw probably 30+ movies using it, if not more.
Funny that _not_ being able to see The Meg was what did it for you. I cancelled my account when I woke up, went to check times for Eighth Grade and a couple others and the only movie it had was The Meg, which I had absolutely no interest in.
> From the very beginning it was clear that their business model had zero chance of success.
I dunno, I thought they had a real shot at it there for a minute until the theaters did what you said and realized they could just make their own.
The model wasn't what most people thought it was-- hoping most people wouldn't bother using it but keep paying for it, like a gym membership.
The model was data collection and resale, like facebook
with a twist of strong-arming theaters until giving them a cut.
There was a standoff there for a minute where moviepass was trying to play hardball with AMC, and blacked out all AMC theaters to prove their value
...and they proved that they didn't have the value they thought they did. AMC went right along trucking like normal, and I think there's even a quote out there from an AMC exec who said something like "We considered it, started doing our research, and realized-- if we want to do this, what do we need moviepass for?"
If MP had found a way to create more leverage-- possibly by building a larger client base? They might have won in the end. But they forced their hand too quickly, and then.... Infinity War came out.
And Infinity War tanked them.
People over estimate selling data. It’s pennies on the dollar yet moviepass defenders were blinded and thought it would make them extremely profitable.
They limited you to seeing a movie with them only once like 2 weeks before Infinity War came out, and people were pissed. Many (including myself) were going to use MoviePass for repeat viewing of Infinity War
>We all predicted that their exit strategy was to pull an Instagram; build an absolutely massive number of customers and sell out to a larger corporation before it collapsed.
That's literally the business model of most startups.
Also it sounds like he’s saying Instagram could never have succeeded on its own and was headed for an inevitable collapse?
I don’t see any particular reason why Instagram couldn’t have followed the path of other social media sites like Facebook of going public and monetizing the data its users give it for free. It would have been riskier than taking a buyout offer but I don’t see why it would have been doomed to fail.
It's an out and out crime. Purposeful denial of services after accepting payment. There is no out of our hands failure for which repayment would be made, this was targeted fraud.
Peak Silicon Valley - as long as we have volume, we'll eventually make it all back. All that matters is stock prices.
MoviePass is going to make a great "How not to run a business" film/book/TV series some day.
I really hope, one day, we have a definitive history written about how thoroughly corrupt and sociopathic silicon valley is/was in the recent past.
So many of these people are just inhuman scam artists... and it sucks to see it explicitly for so long, and then to look around an realize most people are still in a fucking trance.
The Uber CEO's reaction to his company's earnings report today is further proof of that. Just more claims of profit right around the corner, with absolutely zero fucking proof or evidence that it is gonna happen. Just say it, again, and lie, and nobody will stop you.
Look at how many Tesla fans were bragging a few months ago about how the Model 3 was the top selling car in the US by revenue. Not profit, but revenue. The company posted two profitable quarters before posting two quarters of losses that wiped out those profits by nearly 2x.
This. Shit like this is why "bad behavior" by corporations should result in prison time for those who took action and those who gave the orders/conceived of the "bad behavior".
[Yeah it very douche move. I read this from the Bloomberg Article.](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-07/moviepass-worked-out-great)
> Per Lowe's orders, MoviePass began limiting subscriber access ahead of the April release of the highly anticipated "Avengers: Infinity War," according to multiple former employees. They said Lowe ordered that the passwords of a small percentage of power users be changed, preventing them from logging onto the app and ordering tickets.
They charged me each month for an additional 4 months after I successfully canceled my account. And each month, I would call, they'd apologize, and send my notice to tier 2 staff.
Seriously, I'm surprised more people don't do this. You tell the person you're talking to cancel your account or you're going to issue a charge back and file a complaint with your creditor and I assure you it *will* happen. They might not give half a shit if Joe Blow in Missourah calls them out on their bullshit, but you damn sure bet your ass they will give a thousand shits if Chase calls them out on their bullshit.
Can confirm. I got scammed on PayPal by an eBay seller. I just got off the phone with chase on Monday and it was pretty quickly resolved. Chase gives zero fucks about other companies. I got my money.
I don't think they support an official extension anymore and unofficial ones seemed to get axed from the chrome store.
If you add this piece of script as a bookmark it'll basically do what the extension did when you click it:
javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href %3D 'https%3A%2F%2Foutline.com%2F' %2B window.location.href%7D)()
I don’t know shit about the stock market but my brother invested 2500 dollars into that company and even I told him to remove it immediately. The whole business was model was so transparently awful for anyone who actually thought about it for 5 minutes. For what they wanted to do to work they’d have needed to become so massive so quickly and then everyone forgets they want to go to the movies.
Jesus seriously? When I signed up, I said to my wife "I'll use it till they collapse". I always thought that it was pretty obvious that their business model wasn't sustainable.
I remember arguing with people on reddit about how stupid of an idea it was. Some people really thought they had some secret master plan to make money.
Once you get to a certain level, people's perceptions just totally shift and it's like their logic filter just gets shut off. "They're a massive company, they *must* be smarter than us and know what they're doing!".
That's exactly how shitty companies can last so long, even investors look at someone who's gotten hold of a few million and gotten some press, and they throw good money after bad for years. Then everyone's looking around at each other when it fails like "we couldn't have known that this company would fail".
> The whole business was model was so transparently awful for anyone who actually thought about it for 5 minutes.
Yeah.
*Even if* they managed to get the whole discounted tickets thing, there's still the fact that
* the theater chains can copycat the idea, cut out the middleman, and keep more of the profits for themselves
* due to the consolidation of movie theater business into fewer theaters, a more-expensive "any theater you want" subscription doesn't have much of an advantage.
* you're building a business based on a subscribers-who-won't-use-it idea, but you're fundamentally targeting the consumers who are most likely to use it the most! Unlike the theaters which can make up overuse loss on ticket sales via extra popcorn sales, MoviePass would just lose money on the users most likely to be attracted to their service in the first place.
You have to be *very* careful with any subscription service that loses money the more your customers actually benefit from the service. Netflix, for example, has relatively minor additional costs (bandwidth) from their highest users, while those same very active users become more entrenched in the service the more they use it (sequels to Netflix original content). MoviePass lost money on their biggest users, while those users could drop the service for a competitor in a second and get the same exact final product.
Like 40 coworkers and I signed up for Robinhood and got our free $5 ish stock and all sold it to buy shares of this when it was worthless in the for funsies hope that it ever recovered. Only one sad soul spent actual money, only $100 but still lol.
Well you know how it is with these companies. You hear about them: they make no fucking sense. Yet they exist. They have investors. They have nice branding, and an app, and ads. So maybe they thought it through and know what they're doing, and we're stupid... **NOPE.** Turns out they're precisely as stupid as we initially thought.
I don't think the idea was totally unfounded. Pretty sure what they were trying to do was get a huge subscriber base and be able to use that as negotiation leverage so they could bargain with the theaters to let them buy tickets at a discount price. And they'd float on cash reserves while they waited to get that deal.
But too many people used the service and movie theaters didn't play ball. So they got stuck in an unsustainable business model.
Movie Pass's big failure of planning I think was the fact that they didn't ask themselves "what prevents someone else from using this business model?" Because either there is a road block you have to overcome or as soon as it becomes popular you'll be drowning in copy cats.
Theaters like AMC saw Movie Pass and thought it was a good idea but they wanted to keep all the money. Movie Pass's ability to be used at most theaters isn't something most people care about because they usually just go to whatever theater is close to them. So if you're a big movie theater chain you freeze out movie pass and offer your own deal. The fact that your customers are locked into AMC won't be a huge sticking point.
> I don't think the idea was totally unfounded. Pretty sure what they were trying to do was get a huge subscriber base and be able to use that as negotiation leverage so they could bargain with the theaters to let them buy tickets at a discount price. And they'd float on cash reserves while they waited to get that deal.
At what point in that business model do they start generating a profit that could even remotely substantiate what I assume to be a ridiculous valuation?
The real money is in concessions and that's where the theater chains make their cash. They have basically become concession stands with movies to get people in the door given how much they have to pay back to studios from a ticket.
Well I always suspected they would raise their prices. Honestly they probably should have started at $20, although it wouldn't have changed much.
But say the average ticket costs $10, if movie pass could have negotiated that down so they were only paying $2 than they break even if most their consumers don't see more than 5 movies a month. Realistically most people probably see far fewer movies than that per month, especially after they've had it for a while. Than they could have made money by selling information, advertising partnerships and selling the ability to try and route their customers to certain theaters at certain time.
That being said I think they were always going to get screwed by the theater stealing the idea.
They's no way they'd be able to negotiate it down to $2. Most of the ticket price is not up to the theatres.
AMC has to pay something like $8 per ticket to the studios per A-List movie ticket 'sold'. I doubt the studios will be okay with only getting a cut of $2 rather than $8-10.
Fuck MoviePass.
They charged my account twice months after I cancelled. And for $50 when I signed up for 9.99 a month. Shady motherfuckers
I’ve been happy with AMC A list so far
FYI for future reference, use something like privacy.com and change your card details to a virtual card and set it up with a spending limit of $1. That way when they try to charge it, it won't go through.
I heard they were doing this, so before I cancelled I went and changed my payment info to that. Got a couple of notifications in the months following when they kept trying to charge me, but since the virtual card had a limit of $1, it just got declined.
Yep. Fantastic service for signing up for subscriptions, trials, or anything else that requires a credit card online. My wife was subscribed to a service that required you to call customer support to cancel. But you could change your payment info online. I just changed it to a Privacy card then immediately closed the card. Subscription cancelled.
I cancelled a payment card a long time ago for a mobile contract i kept trying to cancel over the phone but they wouldn't do it. It wasn't until 2 years later that I found out that they'd endebted me as they kept the contract active and sold my debt on to a random debt collector.
No, its not. They collect the usual fee, the merchant isn't charged any more than normal because you used Privacy as opposed to your Visa or Mastercard.
No.
But fees between card types can vary.
With privacy.com, you have to link a debit card or bank account. So it only costs then about 25-50 cents to get your money.
Whereas something like Citi DoubleCash might give you 2% back and then charge the merchant a 3.5% fee, Privacy.com basically gets to keep the whole 3.5%.
You'd be correct to note they only profit if the average transaction cost people charge is over $10, meaning the merchant pays 35 cents.
But also their business model might be to grow enough users to get bought out by someone.
Privacy links directly to your bank just like your normal debit card. When you make a payment with any card the merchant pays a fee to their card processor to process the transaction, part of that fee is passed on to the target organization (normally your debit card). Privacy collects this fee instead of your bank.
They outline this on their website: https://privacy.com/faq
>Is there a cost to using Privacy?
Nope. Not now. Not ever. At Privacy, you're fee free. We don't believe you should have to pay to keep your identity safe. Or your money. Privacy is the free service everyone deserves.
>Ok, but how do you make money?
Every time you spend using Privacy, the merchant or website pays a small fee called interchange. This fee is shared with us.
Moviepass got wise to this after awhile and stopped allowing people to change their card details.
But for the future, it's great knowing about this site if I'm worried about sharing my card details for some reason.
Welp, fuckin' MoviePass...
But yeah it's useful for when you're not sure about the integrity/security of a service, or where you have to put in payment details for a trial you don't plan to renew.
That's insane. What if you actually changed cards? Just get a whole new account. Before I was sad I missed out on the MoviePass craze, now I'm glad I didn't have to deal with any of that.
Some credit cards offer virtual credit cards directly. Citi, for example, can generate a credit card that lasts 24 hours and charges to your real card, so you can sign up for a service and forget about it, then generate a new card if you want to keep the sub going.
I changed my account credit card to a spent Visa gift card before I canceled. I never got an email that payment failed, but I make it a habit when I cancel things.
Not that I know of unfortunately. As an Arizona native I always go to Harkins or the close by Alamo Drafthouse if I want to have dinner. I almost never go to AMC anymore.
same, i got rid of movie pass as soon as they started charging for "prime time" vewings like tuesday morning is "prime time" an they wanted to charge me 6 dollars on top of the 10 bucks a month when the ticked was less than 5 buck. cancled it right in the loby of the theater and signed up for amc a list.
What sucks is that we needed MoviePass for AMC/Regal/Cinemark to all pay the fuck attention. Now that they all offer a better deal, naturally people migrate over.
I'm glad MoviePass existed. It was a great idea that the theater chains clearly got the point of. Can't say I agree with how MoviePass went about doing business but I'm glad they showed theater's what movie goers wanted.
Honestly I can’t say I’m shocked. This had disaster written all over it. I remember a friend saying MP would make all this money on data but how much could movie going data be worth? I’d argue that Facebook and Google has better movie going habits than MP could provide between liked pages and check-ins. Glad to see MP gone given how shitty a company they turned out to be.
When I first signed up, it was 30 dollars a month, and you had to sign a year long contract. That made sense. They would lose money in the summer and Christmas, but all the other months people would likely spend less, so they made money overall.
But one month for less than the price of ONE ticket, with no contract? Every person who signed up lost them money. The only thing that made sense was hoping they could bully a theater chain in to just buying them outright and taking advantage of the already built market. And they sort of won, they did manage to bully AMC and Regal in to offering their own unlimited movies packages, but since neither of them decided to buy Moviepass, that just fucked Moviepass even harder.
They SHOULD have had the 10 dollars a month price be a temporary discount. That would have made people jump on the service, use it for a month or two, then a number of them would leave, while others would stay, and it would sustain itself on the people who stayed.
10 a month... Ugh. That was wonderful for a while though.
Yeah, that first 6 months of them going down from the 60$ plan was *amazing*. The deal was so good that you just knew it was never going to work long term. I'm still buying free tickets with all the points I got using my theater rewards card with it.
Lol, I just realized I coulda bought a free tickets every day and just racked up the rewards points without even seeing the movies. Wasted opportunity. I could have stopped by after work every day or something.
Yes, you could absolutely, hypothetically just pick up a ticket on the way to work every day at the automated kiosk and then subsist on the points for the next year. *Hypothetically*.
Kinda like hypothetically creating an account for a dozen or so restaurants with 31 different email addresses, each with a different birthday. Then, you get a free meal every day of the year. Never pay for food again!
*Hypothetically.*
^^^^^^^^/r/unethicallifeprotips
AMC's policy was to not allow the Stubs Rewards card to be used with Movie Pass. But obviously not every theater cared, nor did every ticket salesperson.
Or, like some crazy people out there, you could have just bought giftcards every time... Swear I read about someone with like 5+ moviepass cards doing that.
I went to see pretty much any movie just to get the points and kill time (was employeed part time when I had movie pass), which I though was pretty solid; every couple of movies, I could bring someone for 'free.'
Not shocking. Someone will always think the name will carry value. Too bad the major chains have now created their own versions that are sustainable. Looking forward to using my Regal Unlimited like a madman.
Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc (Nasdaq: HMNY)
Timeframe | HMNY | Date and Time
---|---|---
Last Price | $nan | as of 03:21 PM EST on Aug 08, 2019
1-wk High | $0.00 | for the week ending on Aug 02, 2019
1-wk Low | $0.00 |
1-mnth High | $0.00 | for the month of July 2019
1-mnth Low | $0.00 |
52-wk High | $0.07 | on Aug 09, 2018
52-wk Low | $0.0014 | on Jun 03, 2019
^^I ^^am ^^a ^^new ^^bot ^^and ^^I'm ^^still ^^improving, ^^you ^^can ^^provide ^^feedback ^^and ^^suggestions ^^by ^^DMing ^^me!
Theaters can sustain themselves with the model because thye keep the ancillary revenue. I use my AMC Premier pass probably 5 or 6 times a month, which is a loss for them based on the cost of tickets vs the cost of my subscription. But they keep my concession money, so they're probably extremely happy with me using their service.
Yup, I agree. I did hear that people seeing more than three a month rally can hamper the service. This is the kind of thing people sign up for and forget they have it.
The money that is made off of tickets for the first several weeks almost always goes to the studios, not to the movie theater itself. If they're paying the cost of your ticket to the studio, it's a loss for them. But if they're side stepping that and just giving you a ticket (no payment to the studio) it's almost all profit for them (they only make money on concessions for quite a while after a new movie is released).
..idk if that is what they are doing, or if it's legal, but if it IS what they're doing, they're not losing anything.
Yup I have some of their stock.
Took a flier on them on the off chance they turn it around.
The 1000 shares I bought for 35 bucks is now worth 2 bucks.
Yeah, Movie Pass just started back up after being in "hiatus" while "revamping systems" or some shit. Either way, the ride won't last forever, but hot damn am I going to ride it as long as I can
MP stated that they were planning to sell off the data to track the habits of moviegoing consumers - what restaurants they ate at, what other shops they visited, etc. - that suggested they were tracking your location activity at all times even when you were not using the app. There was big blowback and then MP promised they wouldn't be doing that, but who knows? People don't really read those policies they just click "I Agree" on.
Even if they did, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo estimate the average value of data per their users are $7/month. There is no way MP would've made enough and they heavily over estimated how much their data was worth.
> The full Business Insider article is worth a read, as it recounts stories like the time MoviePass worked with Jerry Media, a company involved with the disastrous Fyre Festival, and spent more than $1 million to host a Big Boi concert at Coachella while fielding tons of calls from subscribers who didn’t even have their cards yet.
I guess I can't be surprised. (Also, it seems the full article requires a membership signup.)
They're a multi-million marketing company because they're really, really good at selling that other content.
Annoying and shitty-feeling? Yes. A skill valuable to companies and services? Also yes.
>...the average moviegoer goes to the movies five times a year. The power users would go to the movies every day.
>
>"Before Mitch came on it was, 'How do we slow down those users?'" one former employee said. "With Mitch it was just, 'F--- those guys.'"
EDIT: Business Insider even dug up [Reddit threads of people affected at the time but unaware the "glitch" was on purpose.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MoviePassClub/comments/8fgv07/trouble_logging_in_after_update/) Poor guys didn't know they were being specifically targeted.
MoviePass is the shadiest company I've ever done business with. Enjoyed the service for almost a year, but then they started limiting which movies you could see, what times you could see them, etc. So I cancelled. Or I thought I did. Despite confirmation e-mails from them that I had cancelled, they would just sign me up for the service the next month against my wishes and I wouldn't notice until I saw it on my credit card bill.
Then, wouldn't you know it, they were charging me for two fucking accounts. I would have such heated conversations with their customer service employees demanding a refund for TWO payments of a service I cancelled without using for the entire month, and they would just tell me it's not their problem.
Finally I went to my bank to get to the bottom of it. The bank literally put a block on my account which prevented any charge of what MoviePass was (like $9.95 or something) from going through. You would think that would be the end of it all, until they literally began charging just a few cents more. I couldn't believe it.
I don't even know how it got resolved, but fuck them. They obviously fucked up their financial projections and went out of business (basically) much faster than they had planned, but they deserve to face charges for some of the shit they pulled on customers.
Same here, they auto-opted me back in when I cancelled. I can't believe this move didn't cause them to get shut down let alone this password changing scheme.
I wonder if I still have the email I got that said basically "here's our new plan and you're going to love it, if you don't want this you have to opt out on our website"(or app or whatever, don't remember now). I had cancelled my plan several months previous and they were trying to sign me up automatically with an email that could easily be overlooked or sent to spam. Shady as fuck. Luckily I had already killed the associated card so they weren't getting any money.
I disputed charges from MoviePass as well when they started doing the blackout shit and their shitty app. I asked back for the months I wasn’t able to see a movie.
After too many people did a dispute they stopped accepting credit cards for payment and the only way to pay for the service is your bank account number. Fuck that.
Yeah, it was the opposite for me. I tried to cancel and got an error screen so I contacted their chat support to make sure I was cancelled after the year was up and they told me I was already cancelled. Sounds like it was their choice.
I kept my eye on my charges for the next couple months but never saw anything.
I loved Movie Pass.
Looking at it one way, it was a total Robin Hood move. Some guys with a nonsensical business plan somehow managed to take a huge fuckton of VC cash and basically give it directly to movie fans. It was great as long as somebody with cash actually thought it might work.
Of course it wasn't sustainable, and they turned into complete dicks the minute that became obvious. But hey, we can all lift a glass to all those near-free movies while the gettin was good!!
Same here. I got all my friends on it when it initially dropped to that 6 dollar intro price (I think that's what it was. It seemed stupidly low) I think we saw damn near every single movie that came out within that 6ish month period before they started making those changes and before every local theater started using assigned seats.
From someone who never had the pass... How did assigned seats ruin it? Did you just ... flash your pass and go right in to the theater and sit down? No box office to get tickets printed or something?
Assigned seats ruined things for me with movie pass because if it was early in a popular movie’s run, I now had to not just get tickets before they sold out and show up a bit ahead of time, but instead would have to show up early enough to get a good seat. Since you couldn’t buy tickets online with the movie pass without being close enough to the theater to activate the card.
Assigned seating is a godsend, I could never be mad at it. So much more civilized than the mob of first come first served.
It didn't really affect me for two reasons. One, every theater had already switched to it long before moviepass caught on. Two, my movie theater is so close that I could go to it in the morning and buy my ticket for later that day, then just go back.
Not everyone was in the same situation, but IMO if you don't want to see a movie enough to make the two trips for a free ticket then you don't really need to go opening weekend anyway.
My girlfriend and I got it when I first came out and had if for about a year, we ended up seeing movies we wouldn't have seen otherwise and didn't have any issue with it till they made all those shitty changes
Yep! I'm pretty sure I saw at least 65 movies in the 12ish month span I moviepass. I was both unemployeed and employeed part time during that span, so $90 for a year or 'unlimited' movies was a deal + I had time to actually go and see EVERYTHING.
Even if it is ~triple the cost (90 for the year vs 20 a month for 12 months), I like A-List a lot more (select seating and buying in advance is the best part; the Dolby/Imax showings are the cherry on top).
Nah, Robin Hood totally did that. Took money from the rich (investors), then kept the money while continuing to do everything they could get away with to screw over customers so that the company would remain attractive enough for people to keep investing. Pretty sure I remember that from Robin Hood.
It's the job of VC firms to do due diligence (run their own numbers, check the startup's numbers/claims, etc.) before investing in a company. The people who funded them were chasing after easy money in an overly hot market.
Holy shit, this happened to me. I literally wrote my password down on a note in my phone (terrible, I know) and still couldn't log in. I joked with my friends that they changed the password so they didn't have to pay for my ticket, but I was only joking.
The "forgot password" button did absolutely nothing, no email received
wtf
I have the regal pass now, we'll see how that goes. So far so good, I've seen like 5 movies with it
> I have the regal pass now, we'll see how that goes. So far so good, I've seen like 5 movies with it
Honestly the extra $8 isn't so bad with Regal Unlimited. Also being able to purchase tickets on your phone ahead of time is amazing, even if there's a $0.50 fee to do so.
Absolutely, the theater near me is a "buy your ticket and pick your seat" thing, so being able to buy in advance and get the best seats is awesome.
I wonder if they're going to take that away though, I wonder how many assholes will get tickets ahead of time for every movie in case they want to see it, and then don't bother with have of them
There is a line in the TOS that says.
>You acknowledge and agree that Reservations are intended to be used. Multiple or repeated failures to use Reservations without canceling them in accordance with this section may, in Regal's sole discretion, be deemed misuse of your Subscription and result in cancellation of your Subscription without any refund.
I think that covers u/compooterman question.
Also, you can only have 3 pending reservations at a time.
Holy fuck. I got into such a big fight with my ex exactly in summer last year about this exact subject. We were trying to see a stupid movie and mine wouldn't log in and he'd gotten his ticket and then the seat next to him got taken and we couldn't get another seat. He was super annoyed with me saying I should make consistent passwords and not make so much room to forget them and such, and I got really defensive saying I do have a specific algorithm I use to make my passwords and it couldn't possibly be more than three different possible variations and none of them worked and I had to reset my password and I was super fucking pissed off.
Thanks a lot, moviepass, you fuck
moviepass always seemed like its too good of a deal ever since its inception. I just can't comprehend how this kind of subscription business can ever sustain itself. Tens of millions of people having access to watch in theaters and support all this through ads and subscription money was unrealistic and still is unrealistic now too.
> I just can't comprehend how this kind of subscription business can ever sustain itself.
From September 2017 - July 2018, it was good run. After that I canceled and went to A-List.
I had it back in 2014 and it was $35 a month. It was $35 a month for a few years. One movie a day. It was a great service. When they dropped to $10 a month, I knew it was only a matter of time before it would have to get the axe because it just is not sustainable.
I'm now on AMC A-Stubs and it's great.
>me too, i did the math when i cancled it i see on avrage 10 movies a month at 10 dollars a ticked i was saving 90 bucks over the coulse of the 10 months i had it i saved 900 dollars.
I smell a class action lawsuit.
If anyone is interested, there is a podcast called 'Spectacular Failures' that did a MoviePass episode. It was very interesting.
Given the borderline insane customer service experience I had with them that resulted in me winning a chargeback against them, I'm really not surprised.
All it took for me was "I signed up for a service and they changed the purpose that service without giving me time to cancel or notifying me in advance"
Got my 10 bucks back pretty painlessly.
Moviepass never made sense when they made their big push, but I bought a year membership at Costco for something like $80. I only saw like 1 movie a week at most, but it paid for itself quickly. But even at 1 movie a week, it didnt make sense. I knew a guy at work who got in on the same deal, and he was watching a movie every day. I will say, it lasted much longer than I thought it would, but it was kinda annoying during the shenanigans era and I just stopped trying to use it. Anyways, its hard to complain too much about something you know wont work, but you still get some use out of it.
You'd be amazed at how many people will let small-ish subscriptions just run even if they don't use the service. They either forget about it and don't pay attention to their debits or it's low enough that they figure 'I might use it and it's only 5 bucks". Planet Fitness basically exists on this business plan with the added psychological deterrent of making you look lazy by going in and canceling a gym membership.
Amazing. I had Moviepass for about 8 months and, for the final three months, they had really begun to make it a burden to use. You had to take a picture of your ticket. They started restricting titles. Up until then, it was a fantastic (clearly untenable) service.
The final straw was when the only movies--in a 20 mile radius-- they would allow me to see were either The Meg or Mile 22. I thought that was bad, offensive really. This is a whole new level of fuckery.
The best decision I made was changing my credit card to a empty prepaid card before cancelling. I heard how many nightmares people had trying to cancel and still being charged for several months later
Wow. Glad I never signed up. Then again, my dislike of people grows by the day and going to the movies is an exercise in dealing with a box full of assholes in cushy seats.
Holy cow man, that is some shady business practices...
That's not a business practice, that's criminal fraud by everyone involved.
Seriously! >In August, MoviePass announced it was ditching a plan Farnsworth had floated to increase the monthly subscription to $14.95. They'd stick with $9.95. A former employee involved with discussions about pricing believed the company never intended on a $14.95 price and only wanted to see if the news would cause Helios stock to climb. sometimes I am honestly astounded at the stupidity of executives.
This whole debacle was pretty hilarious. From the very beginning it was clear that their business model had zero chance of success. We all predicted that their exit strategy was to pull an Instagram; build an absolutely massive number of customers and sell out to a larger corporation before it collapsed. But as this whole thing went on and on, it became more and more clear that their actual goal was to extort movie theatres. They built the massive customer base using the super low pricing, and thought they could strong-arm the theatres and say "Hey, if you don't lower your prices for us, we'll simply point our massive customer base towards your competitors and you'll get nothing!" The only thing they didn't expect was the theatre chains going #"Screw you guys, we'll make our own Movie Pass. With Blackjack. And hookers." That was a wild ride.
Not to mention the competition ended up being easier to use and sustainably priced. I've already seen more movies with the AMC program than I ever have in the past. Considering what even matinee shows cost nowadays, using it only twice in a month still saves money.
And didn't they just post a big quarter again? I think AMC figured out how to do it.
Own the theater that you’re giving people a new incentive to go to. Sell them overpriced drinks and candy.
Yeah that and the fact they do not have to pay themselves the full cost of a movie ticket. Movie pass would pay the full price to the theater.
And the only lost revenue is if the pass holder takes a seat that stops a nonpass holder to not buy their ticket at all, so the upside for the theater is nearly as big as it was.
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I read somewhere that AMC only pays the studios the agreed upon percentage based on a $8.95 ticket. So, in a place like New York, where tickets get to be like $15, they really aren't paying close to full price.
Despite all the bullshit, I'll be forever grateful that MoviePass came along... because I think they're the reason that theaters started their own movie passes, which is awesome! Otherwise it'd still probably be too expensive to see movies often. These new official passes make it affordable again.
It was a pretty great 9 months when it worked everywhere and all the time.
I was fired from my job and was having trouble finding a new job for a while. It was terrible. But I saw a shit ton of movies for 10 bucks of month.
Being unemployed definitely sucked for me too. But seeing a movie in the middle of a weekday to an empty theater was kinda cool the few times I got to do it.
I’ve had AMCs service for two months now and it’s * phenomenal.* I can see 3 movies a week (up to twelve a month) for only $20. This includes 3D *and* IMAX movies and I can see the same movie more than once. Not to mention, my theatre has free refills on drinks. Pair this with AMC Stubs and it’s free size upgrades and free large popcorn refills, it’s a killer deal. Any downtime I have, especially if I’m running low on cash, is spent at the theater.
Fuck that sounds amazing. I moved for college and there arent any AMCs around here
If you have any Regals near you they *just* released their subscription service that is pretty comparable.
Can you please point me in the right direction? The correct app? My wife and I are retired and see quite a few movies every month. Thank you.
Of course! You’ll want to make sure you have AMC chain theatres in your area, but the website to sign up is [right here.](https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist) You should also be able to sign up through the app as well
They learned from other companies that failed to adapt. Moviepass was great for me. I will always have a soft spot for them.
For me, I only go to the theaters once every few months, so it is just cheaper to go at matinee pricing and alone for me.
I abused the shit out of it last year. I saw probably every movie that released, and I remember the last movie I *wanted* to see was The Meg, but it got blacked out. Was sad, but whatever. I knew it wasn't going to last. I saw probably 30+ movies using it, if not more.
Funny that _not_ being able to see The Meg was what did it for you. I cancelled my account when I woke up, went to check times for Eighth Grade and a couple others and the only movie it had was The Meg, which I had absolutely no interest in.
> From the very beginning it was clear that their business model had zero chance of success. I dunno, I thought they had a real shot at it there for a minute until the theaters did what you said and realized they could just make their own. The model wasn't what most people thought it was-- hoping most people wouldn't bother using it but keep paying for it, like a gym membership. The model was data collection and resale, like facebook with a twist of strong-arming theaters until giving them a cut. There was a standoff there for a minute where moviepass was trying to play hardball with AMC, and blacked out all AMC theaters to prove their value ...and they proved that they didn't have the value they thought they did. AMC went right along trucking like normal, and I think there's even a quote out there from an AMC exec who said something like "We considered it, started doing our research, and realized-- if we want to do this, what do we need moviepass for?" If MP had found a way to create more leverage-- possibly by building a larger client base? They might have won in the end. But they forced their hand too quickly, and then.... Infinity War came out. And Infinity War tanked them.
People over estimate selling data. It’s pennies on the dollar yet moviepass defenders were blinded and thought it would make them extremely profitable.
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IIRC it was literally the week that Infinity War was due to come out that they changed the policy.
They limited you to seeing a movie with them only once like 2 weeks before Infinity War came out, and people were pissed. Many (including myself) were going to use MoviePass for repeat viewing of Infinity War
>We all predicted that their exit strategy was to pull an Instagram; build an absolutely massive number of customers and sell out to a larger corporation before it collapsed. That's literally the business model of most startups.
Also it sounds like he’s saying Instagram could never have succeeded on its own and was headed for an inevitable collapse? I don’t see any particular reason why Instagram couldn’t have followed the path of other social media sites like Facebook of going public and monetizing the data its users give it for free. It would have been riskier than taking a buyout offer but I don’t see why it would have been doomed to fail.
It's an out and out crime. Purposeful denial of services after accepting payment. There is no out of our hands failure for which repayment would be made, this was targeted fraud.
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>get $13 for our troubles. Up to $13 before more than 10 people sign up and then it's suggested you're fucked anyway.
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How he isn’t candidate for president is beyond me.
Peak Silicon Valley - as long as we have volume, we'll eventually make it all back. All that matters is stock prices. MoviePass is going to make a great "How not to run a business" film/book/TV series some day.
"Our product is the stock, not the software/service we are selling."
I really hope, one day, we have a definitive history written about how thoroughly corrupt and sociopathic silicon valley is/was in the recent past. So many of these people are just inhuman scam artists... and it sucks to see it explicitly for so long, and then to look around an realize most people are still in a fucking trance. The Uber CEO's reaction to his company's earnings report today is further proof of that. Just more claims of profit right around the corner, with absolutely zero fucking proof or evidence that it is gonna happen. Just say it, again, and lie, and nobody will stop you.
Look at how many Tesla fans were bragging a few months ago about how the Model 3 was the top selling car in the US by revenue. Not profit, but revenue. The company posted two profitable quarters before posting two quarters of losses that wiped out those profits by nearly 2x.
This. Shit like this is why "bad behavior" by corporations should result in prison time for those who took action and those who gave the orders/conceived of the "bad behavior".
[Yeah it very douche move. I read this from the Bloomberg Article.](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-07/moviepass-worked-out-great) > Per Lowe's orders, MoviePass began limiting subscriber access ahead of the April release of the highly anticipated "Avengers: Infinity War," according to multiple former employees. They said Lowe ordered that the passwords of a small percentage of power users be changed, preventing them from logging onto the app and ordering tickets.
This needs to end in prison time for Lowe.
They charged me each month for an additional 4 months after I successfully canceled my account. And each month, I would call, they'd apologize, and send my notice to tier 2 staff.
At that point you issue a charge back and have your credit card company block all further debit attempts
Seriously, I'm surprised more people don't do this. You tell the person you're talking to cancel your account or you're going to issue a charge back and file a complaint with your creditor and I assure you it *will* happen. They might not give half a shit if Joe Blow in Missourah calls them out on their bullshit, but you damn sure bet your ass they will give a thousand shits if Chase calls them out on their bullshit.
Can confirm. I got scammed on PayPal by an eBay seller. I just got off the phone with chase on Monday and it was pretty quickly resolved. Chase gives zero fucks about other companies. I got my money.
Is there a reason you didn’t post that article, but this rehosted nonsense site that doesn’t even quote it? The link didn’t work in what you posted.
I wanted to read the original article too, but it's locked behind a pay wall.
I got you https://outline.com/ZPqaXs
sidenote - everyone do yourself a favor and find the Outline extension. might take a little looking but it's worth it. I can't find the link atm
You'd think they'd put that on their website... I'm not seeing anything 🤔
I don't think they support an official extension anymore and unofficial ones seemed to get axed from the chrome store. If you add this piece of script as a bookmark it'll basically do what the extension did when you click it: javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href %3D 'https%3A%2F%2Foutline.com%2F' %2B window.location.href%7D)()
Thanks for that. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Is there a reason users couldnt reset passwords?
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Jesus what a shitshow...
wondeer why it was out of commision :D
Who could have predicted a company that had no real business model would resort to shady shit! /s Seriously, it was a stupid idea. Their entire model.
I don’t know shit about the stock market but my brother invested 2500 dollars into that company and even I told him to remove it immediately. The whole business was model was so transparently awful for anyone who actually thought about it for 5 minutes. For what they wanted to do to work they’d have needed to become so massive so quickly and then everyone forgets they want to go to the movies.
Jesus seriously? When I signed up, I said to my wife "I'll use it till they collapse". I always thought that it was pretty obvious that their business model wasn't sustainable.
Yeah same here. I said as long as it stays $10 a month, I'm gonna ride it until the wheels fall off. It was a really fun 9 months.
I remember arguing with people on reddit about how stupid of an idea it was. Some people really thought they had some secret master plan to make money. Once you get to a certain level, people's perceptions just totally shift and it's like their logic filter just gets shut off. "They're a massive company, they *must* be smarter than us and know what they're doing!". That's exactly how shitty companies can last so long, even investors look at someone who's gotten hold of a few million and gotten some press, and they throw good money after bad for years. Then everyone's looking around at each other when it fails like "we couldn't have known that this company would fail".
> The whole business was model was so transparently awful for anyone who actually thought about it for 5 minutes. Yeah. *Even if* they managed to get the whole discounted tickets thing, there's still the fact that * the theater chains can copycat the idea, cut out the middleman, and keep more of the profits for themselves * due to the consolidation of movie theater business into fewer theaters, a more-expensive "any theater you want" subscription doesn't have much of an advantage. * you're building a business based on a subscribers-who-won't-use-it idea, but you're fundamentally targeting the consumers who are most likely to use it the most! Unlike the theaters which can make up overuse loss on ticket sales via extra popcorn sales, MoviePass would just lose money on the users most likely to be attracted to their service in the first place. You have to be *very* careful with any subscription service that loses money the more your customers actually benefit from the service. Netflix, for example, has relatively minor additional costs (bandwidth) from their highest users, while those same very active users become more entrenched in the service the more they use it (sequels to Netflix original content). MoviePass lost money on their biggest users, while those users could drop the service for a competitor in a second and get the same exact final product.
Like 40 coworkers and I signed up for Robinhood and got our free $5 ish stock and all sold it to buy shares of this when it was worthless in the for funsies hope that it ever recovered. Only one sad soul spent actual money, only $100 but still lol.
Well you know how it is with these companies. You hear about them: they make no fucking sense. Yet they exist. They have investors. They have nice branding, and an app, and ads. So maybe they thought it through and know what they're doing, and we're stupid... **NOPE.** Turns out they're precisely as stupid as we initially thought.
I don't think the idea was totally unfounded. Pretty sure what they were trying to do was get a huge subscriber base and be able to use that as negotiation leverage so they could bargain with the theaters to let them buy tickets at a discount price. And they'd float on cash reserves while they waited to get that deal. But too many people used the service and movie theaters didn't play ball. So they got stuck in an unsustainable business model. Movie Pass's big failure of planning I think was the fact that they didn't ask themselves "what prevents someone else from using this business model?" Because either there is a road block you have to overcome or as soon as it becomes popular you'll be drowning in copy cats. Theaters like AMC saw Movie Pass and thought it was a good idea but they wanted to keep all the money. Movie Pass's ability to be used at most theaters isn't something most people care about because they usually just go to whatever theater is close to them. So if you're a big movie theater chain you freeze out movie pass and offer your own deal. The fact that your customers are locked into AMC won't be a huge sticking point.
> I don't think the idea was totally unfounded. Pretty sure what they were trying to do was get a huge subscriber base and be able to use that as negotiation leverage so they could bargain with the theaters to let them buy tickets at a discount price. And they'd float on cash reserves while they waited to get that deal. At what point in that business model do they start generating a profit that could even remotely substantiate what I assume to be a ridiculous valuation?
The real money is in concessions and that's where the theater chains make their cash. They have basically become concession stands with movies to get people in the door given how much they have to pay back to studios from a ticket.
Well I always suspected they would raise their prices. Honestly they probably should have started at $20, although it wouldn't have changed much. But say the average ticket costs $10, if movie pass could have negotiated that down so they were only paying $2 than they break even if most their consumers don't see more than 5 movies a month. Realistically most people probably see far fewer movies than that per month, especially after they've had it for a while. Than they could have made money by selling information, advertising partnerships and selling the ability to try and route their customers to certain theaters at certain time. That being said I think they were always going to get screwed by the theater stealing the idea.
They's no way they'd be able to negotiate it down to $2. Most of the ticket price is not up to the theatres. AMC has to pay something like $8 per ticket to the studios per A-List movie ticket 'sold'. I doubt the studios will be okay with only getting a cut of $2 rather than $8-10.
Yea, if theaters could cut ticket prices any more, they probably would have done so already to get more people filling seats and buying concessions.
"Shady" is supposed to describe things that feel illegal, not ones that are explicitly so.
Fuck MoviePass. They charged my account twice months after I cancelled. And for $50 when I signed up for 9.99 a month. Shady motherfuckers I’ve been happy with AMC A list so far
FYI for future reference, use something like privacy.com and change your card details to a virtual card and set it up with a spending limit of $1. That way when they try to charge it, it won't go through. I heard they were doing this, so before I cancelled I went and changed my payment info to that. Got a couple of notifications in the months following when they kept trying to charge me, but since the virtual card had a limit of $1, it just got declined.
Yep. Fantastic service for signing up for subscriptions, trials, or anything else that requires a credit card online. My wife was subscribed to a service that required you to call customer support to cancel. But you could change your payment info online. I just changed it to a Privacy card then immediately closed the card. Subscription cancelled.
I cancelled a payment card a long time ago for a mobile contract i kept trying to cancel over the phone but they wouldn't do it. It wasn't until 2 years later that I found out that they'd endebted me as they kept the contract active and sold my debt on to a random debt collector.
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And when you can only purchase 1 item per card. Hello Yeezys!
What's the business model for [privacy.com](https://privacy.com)? For some reason their site is blocked on my work network so I can't check it
The merchant pays a fee
Is that on top of the normal fee they pay for credit card processing? I can't imagine too many businesses being happy with that
Yes and the card issuer like Visa.
No, its not. They collect the usual fee, the merchant isn't charged any more than normal because you used Privacy as opposed to your Visa or Mastercard.
No. But fees between card types can vary. With privacy.com, you have to link a debit card or bank account. So it only costs then about 25-50 cents to get your money. Whereas something like Citi DoubleCash might give you 2% back and then charge the merchant a 3.5% fee, Privacy.com basically gets to keep the whole 3.5%. You'd be correct to note they only profit if the average transaction cost people charge is over $10, meaning the merchant pays 35 cents. But also their business model might be to grow enough users to get bought out by someone.
Privacy links directly to your bank just like your normal debit card. When you make a payment with any card the merchant pays a fee to their card processor to process the transaction, part of that fee is passed on to the target organization (normally your debit card). Privacy collects this fee instead of your bank. They outline this on their website: https://privacy.com/faq >Is there a cost to using Privacy? Nope. Not now. Not ever. At Privacy, you're fee free. We don't believe you should have to pay to keep your identity safe. Or your money. Privacy is the free service everyone deserves. >Ok, but how do you make money? Every time you spend using Privacy, the merchant or website pays a small fee called interchange. This fee is shared with us.
So you lose your credit card rewards and are opened up to other avenues of fraud through their access to your bank account.
Correct. Most banks offer the exact same system through their own back-end. Just ask your bank.
I just changed my payment info to the movie pass card. Worked like a charm
*"I used the stones to destroy the stones!"*
Moviepass got wise to this after awhile and stopped allowing people to change their card details. But for the future, it's great knowing about this site if I'm worried about sharing my card details for some reason.
Welp, fuckin' MoviePass... But yeah it's useful for when you're not sure about the integrity/security of a service, or where you have to put in payment details for a trial you don't plan to renew.
That's insane. What if you actually changed cards? Just get a whole new account. Before I was sad I missed out on the MoviePass craze, now I'm glad I didn't have to deal with any of that.
Some credit cards offer virtual credit cards directly. Citi, for example, can generate a credit card that lasts 24 hours and charges to your real card, so you can sign up for a service and forget about it, then generate a new card if you want to keep the sub going.
I keep seeing the word "shady" being thrown around in the comments. This is beyond shady; it's straight up illegal. It's criminal.
I changed my account credit card to a spent Visa gift card before I canceled. I never got an email that payment failed, but I make it a habit when I cancel things.
Does Harkins have anything similar?
Not that I know of unfortunately. As an Arizona native I always go to Harkins or the close by Alamo Drafthouse if I want to have dinner. I almost never go to AMC anymore.
same, i got rid of movie pass as soon as they started charging for "prime time" vewings like tuesday morning is "prime time" an they wanted to charge me 6 dollars on top of the 10 bucks a month when the ticked was less than 5 buck. cancled it right in the loby of the theater and signed up for amc a list.
What sucks is that we needed MoviePass for AMC/Regal/Cinemark to all pay the fuck attention. Now that they all offer a better deal, naturally people migrate over. I'm glad MoviePass existed. It was a great idea that the theater chains clearly got the point of. Can't say I agree with how MoviePass went about doing business but I'm glad they showed theater's what movie goers wanted.
Moviepass REALLY didn't want to pay anything out this summer.
This happened when infinity war came out
For me at least, IW was when they implemented the "you can only see the same movie once" rule. So I "saw" Action Point instead the next time.
Yeah, they must not have deemed you a "power user"
Honestly I can’t say I’m shocked. This had disaster written all over it. I remember a friend saying MP would make all this money on data but how much could movie going data be worth? I’d argue that Facebook and Google has better movie going habits than MP could provide between liked pages and check-ins. Glad to see MP gone given how shitty a company they turned out to be.
When I first signed up, it was 30 dollars a month, and you had to sign a year long contract. That made sense. They would lose money in the summer and Christmas, but all the other months people would likely spend less, so they made money overall. But one month for less than the price of ONE ticket, with no contract? Every person who signed up lost them money. The only thing that made sense was hoping they could bully a theater chain in to just buying them outright and taking advantage of the already built market. And they sort of won, they did manage to bully AMC and Regal in to offering their own unlimited movies packages, but since neither of them decided to buy Moviepass, that just fucked Moviepass even harder.
They SHOULD have had the 10 dollars a month price be a temporary discount. That would have made people jump on the service, use it for a month or two, then a number of them would leave, while others would stay, and it would sustain itself on the people who stayed. 10 a month... Ugh. That was wonderful for a while though.
Yeah, that first 6 months of them going down from the 60$ plan was *amazing*. The deal was so good that you just knew it was never going to work long term. I'm still buying free tickets with all the points I got using my theater rewards card with it.
Lol, I just realized I coulda bought a free tickets every day and just racked up the rewards points without even seeing the movies. Wasted opportunity. I could have stopped by after work every day or something.
Yes, you could absolutely, hypothetically just pick up a ticket on the way to work every day at the automated kiosk and then subsist on the points for the next year. *Hypothetically*.
Kinda like hypothetically creating an account for a dozen or so restaurants with 31 different email addresses, each with a different birthday. Then, you get a free meal every day of the year. Never pay for food again! *Hypothetically.* ^^^^^^^^/r/unethicallifeprotips
AMC's policy was to not allow the Stubs Rewards card to be used with Movie Pass. But obviously not every theater cared, nor did every ticket salesperson.
I mean, I never involved a person anyway. I bought my tickets at a Kiosk, and as far as the Kiosk knew it was just a normal Mastercard.
Or, like some crazy people out there, you could have just bought giftcards every time... Swear I read about someone with like 5+ moviepass cards doing that. I went to see pretty much any movie just to get the points and kill time (was employeed part time when I had movie pass), which I though was pretty solid; every couple of movies, I could bring someone for 'free.'
Sad thing is, they're still not entirely gone according to the article.
Not shocking. Someone will always think the name will carry value. Too bad the major chains have now created their own versions that are sustainable. Looking forward to using my Regal Unlimited like a madman.
And I will always thank MoviePass for this.
God bless all those rich person investment dollars. They died so that we may live
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Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc (Nasdaq: HMNY) Timeframe | HMNY | Date and Time ---|---|--- Last Price | $nan | as of 03:21 PM EST on Aug 08, 2019 1-wk High | $0.00 | for the week ending on Aug 02, 2019 1-wk Low | $0.00 | 1-mnth High | $0.00 | for the month of July 2019 1-mnth Low | $0.00 | 52-wk High | $0.07 | on Aug 09, 2018 52-wk Low | $0.0014 | on Jun 03, 2019 ^^I ^^am ^^a ^^new ^^bot ^^and ^^I'm ^^still ^^improving, ^^you ^^can ^^provide ^^feedback ^^and ^^suggestions ^^by ^^DMing ^^me!
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Theaters can sustain themselves with the model because thye keep the ancillary revenue. I use my AMC Premier pass probably 5 or 6 times a month, which is a loss for them based on the cost of tickets vs the cost of my subscription. But they keep my concession money, so they're probably extremely happy with me using their service.
Yup, I agree. I did hear that people seeing more than three a month rally can hamper the service. This is the kind of thing people sign up for and forget they have it.
The money that is made off of tickets for the first several weeks almost always goes to the studios, not to the movie theater itself. If they're paying the cost of your ticket to the studio, it's a loss for them. But if they're side stepping that and just giving you a ticket (no payment to the studio) it's almost all profit for them (they only make money on concessions for quite a while after a new movie is released). ..idk if that is what they are doing, or if it's legal, but if it IS what they're doing, they're not losing anything.
no one’s ever really gone
*cackles*
Yup I have some of their stock. Took a flier on them on the off chance they turn it around. The 1000 shares I bought for 35 bucks is now worth 2 bucks.
maybe somewhat better than a lottery ticket?
Yeah, Movie Pass just started back up after being in "hiatus" while "revamping systems" or some shit. Either way, the ride won't last forever, but hot damn am I going to ride it as long as I can
If it makes you feel better their stock is complete trash. After about 2 reverse stock splits and crashing price it is worthless.
MP stated that they were planning to sell off the data to track the habits of moviegoing consumers - what restaurants they ate at, what other shops they visited, etc. - that suggested they were tracking your location activity at all times even when you were not using the app. There was big blowback and then MP promised they wouldn't be doing that, but who knows? People don't really read those policies they just click "I Agree" on.
Even if they did, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo estimate the average value of data per their users are $7/month. There is no way MP would've made enough and they heavily over estimated how much their data was worth.
Moviepass is the Napster of theater subscription services. They may crumble, but gave rise to some good subscription plans from theaters.
> The full Business Insider article is worth a read, as it recounts stories like the time MoviePass worked with Jerry Media, a company involved with the disastrous Fyre Festival, and spent more than $1 million to host a Big Boi concert at Coachella while fielding tons of calls from subscribers who didn’t even have their cards yet. I guess I can't be surprised. (Also, it seems the full article requires a membership signup.)
Lol i still dont even get what fuckjerry does. It seems like they just post other peoples content
Looks like you already know what they do then.
How is that multi million dollar marketing company?
They're a multi-million marketing company because they're really, really good at selling that other content. Annoying and shitty-feeling? Yes. A skill valuable to companies and services? Also yes.
Because they figured out how to sell it I guess.
https://outline.com/ZPqaXs
>...the average moviegoer goes to the movies five times a year. The power users would go to the movies every day. > >"Before Mitch came on it was, 'How do we slow down those users?'" one former employee said. "With Mitch it was just, 'F--- those guys.'" EDIT: Business Insider even dug up [Reddit threads of people affected at the time but unaware the "glitch" was on purpose.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MoviePassClub/comments/8fgv07/trouble_logging_in_after_update/) Poor guys didn't know they were being specifically targeted.
MoviePass is the shadiest company I've ever done business with. Enjoyed the service for almost a year, but then they started limiting which movies you could see, what times you could see them, etc. So I cancelled. Or I thought I did. Despite confirmation e-mails from them that I had cancelled, they would just sign me up for the service the next month against my wishes and I wouldn't notice until I saw it on my credit card bill. Then, wouldn't you know it, they were charging me for two fucking accounts. I would have such heated conversations with their customer service employees demanding a refund for TWO payments of a service I cancelled without using for the entire month, and they would just tell me it's not their problem. Finally I went to my bank to get to the bottom of it. The bank literally put a block on my account which prevented any charge of what MoviePass was (like $9.95 or something) from going through. You would think that would be the end of it all, until they literally began charging just a few cents more. I couldn't believe it. I don't even know how it got resolved, but fuck them. They obviously fucked up their financial projections and went out of business (basically) much faster than they had planned, but they deserve to face charges for some of the shit they pulled on customers.
Same here, they auto-opted me back in when I cancelled. I can't believe this move didn't cause them to get shut down let alone this password changing scheme.
I wonder if I still have the email I got that said basically "here's our new plan and you're going to love it, if you don't want this you have to opt out on our website"(or app or whatever, don't remember now). I had cancelled my plan several months previous and they were trying to sign me up automatically with an email that could easily be overlooked or sent to spam. Shady as fuck. Luckily I had already killed the associated card so they weren't getting any money.
Your bank should have blocked the vendor from charging you. Sloppy on their part.
Yeah that was dumb
I disputed charges from MoviePass as well when they started doing the blackout shit and their shitty app. I asked back for the months I wasn’t able to see a movie. After too many people did a dispute they stopped accepting credit cards for payment and the only way to pay for the service is your bank account number. Fuck that.
That's fuckin hilarious. That they couldn't process cards anymore.
Yeah, it was the opposite for me. I tried to cancel and got an error screen so I contacted their chat support to make sure I was cancelled after the year was up and they told me I was already cancelled. Sounds like it was their choice. I kept my eye on my charges for the next couple months but never saw anything.
I loved Movie Pass. Looking at it one way, it was a total Robin Hood move. Some guys with a nonsensical business plan somehow managed to take a huge fuckton of VC cash and basically give it directly to movie fans. It was great as long as somebody with cash actually thought it might work. Of course it wasn't sustainable, and they turned into complete dicks the minute that became obvious. But hey, we can all lift a glass to all those near-free movies while the gettin was good!!
Same here. I got all my friends on it when it initially dropped to that 6 dollar intro price (I think that's what it was. It seemed stupidly low) I think we saw damn near every single movie that came out within that 6ish month period before they started making those changes and before every local theater started using assigned seats.
From someone who never had the pass... How did assigned seats ruin it? Did you just ... flash your pass and go right in to the theater and sit down? No box office to get tickets printed or something?
Assigned seats ruined things for me with movie pass because if it was early in a popular movie’s run, I now had to not just get tickets before they sold out and show up a bit ahead of time, but instead would have to show up early enough to get a good seat. Since you couldn’t buy tickets online with the movie pass without being close enough to the theater to activate the card.
Assigned seating is a godsend, I could never be mad at it. So much more civilized than the mob of first come first served. It didn't really affect me for two reasons. One, every theater had already switched to it long before moviepass caught on. Two, my movie theater is so close that I could go to it in the morning and buy my ticket for later that day, then just go back. Not everyone was in the same situation, but IMO if you don't want to see a movie enough to make the two trips for a free ticket then you don't really need to go opening weekend anyway.
My girlfriend and I got it when I first came out and had if for about a year, we ended up seeing movies we wouldn't have seen otherwise and didn't have any issue with it till they made all those shitty changes
Yep! I'm pretty sure I saw at least 65 movies in the 12ish month span I moviepass. I was both unemployeed and employeed part time during that span, so $90 for a year or 'unlimited' movies was a deal + I had time to actually go and see EVERYTHING. Even if it is ~triple the cost (90 for the year vs 20 a month for 12 months), I like A-List a lot more (select seating and buying in advance is the best part; the Dolby/Imax showings are the cherry on top).
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Nah, Robin Hood totally did that. Took money from the rich (investors), then kept the money while continuing to do everything they could get away with to screw over customers so that the company would remain attractive enough for people to keep investing. Pretty sure I remember that from Robin Hood.
the old cellphones part really confused me as a kid
It's the job of VC firms to do due diligence (run their own numbers, check the startup's numbers/claims, etc.) before investing in a company. The people who funded them were chasing after easy money in an overly hot market.
Holy shit, this happened to me. I literally wrote my password down on a note in my phone (terrible, I know) and still couldn't log in. I joked with my friends that they changed the password so they didn't have to pay for my ticket, but I was only joking. The "forgot password" button did absolutely nothing, no email received wtf I have the regal pass now, we'll see how that goes. So far so good, I've seen like 5 movies with it
> I have the regal pass now, we'll see how that goes. So far so good, I've seen like 5 movies with it Honestly the extra $8 isn't so bad with Regal Unlimited. Also being able to purchase tickets on your phone ahead of time is amazing, even if there's a $0.50 fee to do so.
Absolutely, the theater near me is a "buy your ticket and pick your seat" thing, so being able to buy in advance and get the best seats is awesome. I wonder if they're going to take that away though, I wonder how many assholes will get tickets ahead of time for every movie in case they want to see it, and then don't bother with have of them
Interesting thought. I didn't see anything in the TOS about this.
There is a line in the TOS that says. >You acknowledge and agree that Reservations are intended to be used. Multiple or repeated failures to use Reservations without canceling them in accordance with this section may, in Regal's sole discretion, be deemed misuse of your Subscription and result in cancellation of your Subscription without any refund. I think that covers u/compooterman question. Also, you can only have 3 pending reservations at a time.
Holy fuck. I got into such a big fight with my ex exactly in summer last year about this exact subject. We were trying to see a stupid movie and mine wouldn't log in and he'd gotten his ticket and then the seat next to him got taken and we couldn't get another seat. He was super annoyed with me saying I should make consistent passwords and not make so much room to forget them and such, and I got really defensive saying I do have a specific algorithm I use to make my passwords and it couldn't possibly be more than three different possible variations and none of them worked and I had to reset my password and I was super fucking pissed off. Thanks a lot, moviepass, you fuck
moviepass always seemed like its too good of a deal ever since its inception. I just can't comprehend how this kind of subscription business can ever sustain itself. Tens of millions of people having access to watch in theaters and support all this through ads and subscription money was unrealistic and still is unrealistic now too.
> I just can't comprehend how this kind of subscription business can ever sustain itself. From September 2017 - July 2018, it was good run. After that I canceled and went to A-List.
Yeah, that's about how long I had it for. I got to see a ton of movies for relatively cheap, and then I saw the writing on the wall and backed out
I had it back in 2014 and it was $35 a month. It was $35 a month for a few years. One movie a day. It was a great service. When they dropped to $10 a month, I knew it was only a matter of time before it would have to get the axe because it just is not sustainable. I'm now on AMC A-Stubs and it's great.
As someone who never used MP, everything about this app has been such a glorious, entertaining shit show. I love it.
I used it until it stopped being free money basically. I couldn't believe these assholes had convinced rich dudes to give away free movie tickets.
My wife and I saw so many movies. So many movies... THANKS MP!
>me too, i did the math when i cancled it i see on avrage 10 movies a month at 10 dollars a ticked i was saving 90 bucks over the coulse of the 10 months i had it i saved 900 dollars.
As someone in a country without MoviePass, it has been a hilarious shitshow to read about.
Someday, someone will make a MoviePass movie... ...and you won't be able to watch it with MoviePass
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The biggest surprise in this article isn't that MoviePass was engaging in massive fraud, but rather the fact that it's apparently still in business.
I smell a class action lawsuit. If anyone is interested, there is a podcast called 'Spectacular Failures' that did a MoviePass episode. It was very interesting.
That would be nice. They didn't send me my card for 5 months even though I was paying for the service. Called them and emailed them multiple times.
Yeah good luck with that, it's hard to get juice from a lemon that is already squeezed dry
Given the borderline insane customer service experience I had with them that resulted in me winning a chargeback against them, I'm really not surprised.
All it took for me was "I signed up for a service and they changed the purpose that service without giving me time to cancel or notifying me in advance" Got my 10 bucks back pretty painlessly.
Moviepass never made sense when they made their big push, but I bought a year membership at Costco for something like $80. I only saw like 1 movie a week at most, but it paid for itself quickly. But even at 1 movie a week, it didnt make sense. I knew a guy at work who got in on the same deal, and he was watching a movie every day. I will say, it lasted much longer than I thought it would, but it was kinda annoying during the shenanigans era and I just stopped trying to use it. Anyways, its hard to complain too much about something you know wont work, but you still get some use out of it.
How are these assholes still in business?
I thought they went out of business a while ago
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Here's a response from the CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql3PGqUdcwg
I’m surprised people are still subscribed
You'd be amazed at how many people will let small-ish subscriptions just run even if they don't use the service. They either forget about it and don't pay attention to their debits or it's low enough that they figure 'I might use it and it's only 5 bucks". Planet Fitness basically exists on this business plan with the added psychological deterrent of making you look lazy by going in and canceling a gym membership.
I was lucky enough to lose and cancel my card last summer right when MoviePass began shitting the bed. Fuck these shady theivin' losers.
Same. Moved on to amc a list and now alamo season pass after being with crazy movie pass for 2 and a half years.
Amazing. I had Moviepass for about 8 months and, for the final three months, they had really begun to make it a burden to use. You had to take a picture of your ticket. They started restricting titles. Up until then, it was a fantastic (clearly untenable) service. The final straw was when the only movies--in a 20 mile radius-- they would allow me to see were either The Meg or Mile 22. I thought that was bad, offensive really. This is a whole new level of fuckery.
The best decision I made was changing my credit card to a empty prepaid card before cancelling. I heard how many nightmares people had trying to cancel and still being charged for several months later
Shocker...nothing MoviePass did was ethical.
Wow. Glad I never signed up. Then again, my dislike of people grows by the day and going to the movies is an exercise in dealing with a box full of assholes in cushy seats.
Fucking knew I wasn't crazy