One of the most controversial subscription services in recent memory has been MoviePass. The service started to get a lot of attention in late 2017 when they announced that they would be allowing members to see one movie every day for only $10 every month. Any person with common sense wondered how the company financing MoviePass was doing this when most single movie tickets cost more than $10. The very low price caused the service to get millions of subscribers at their peak. However, it was only a matter of time until the bottom fell out. That time finally came in the summer of 2018.
The parent company of MoviePass began to run out of money. This makes sense because they were paying the theaters full price for every movie that was seen by their subscribers. As you might imagine, people started to use the service to see a lot of movies. This cost the company a fortune. It reached a point where the company totally ran out of money. The service went offline until they were able to get a loan. After that, MoviePass was forced to make restrictions on how many movies that people could see every month. They also announced a price increase.
MoviePass started to lose massive amounts of subscribers. However, they were able to hang around until Sept. of 2019 when the company finally announced that they were going to close up shop for good. There have been many business experts who have wondered what the business model of MoviePass was from the start. They clearly could not have expected to make money by charging people only $10 to see as many as 30 movies every month. The company also became controversial when it began to automatically renew subscriptions for people who did not want to be renewed.
The demise of MoviePass was expected. However, the surprise is that the head of the company has said that it might be able to come back at some point in the future. That seems very unlikely at this point. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make a comeback at some point in the future. One of their biggest problems came when they started to restrict what movies could be seen and at what time of the day. This really angered their subscribers and caused them to leave. They must not make a mistake like that again in the future.
