Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want??
 

As movie theaters struggle with tepid sales, Mitch Lowe has an extreme proposal for how to get more people into seats: Let them come to all the showings they want for about the price of a single ticket each month.

Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company's movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens.

MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people's movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. The companies declined to comment on terms of the financing but said MoviePass intends to hold an initial public offering by March.

Ted Farnsworth, chief executive officer at Helios and Matheson, said the goal is to amass a large base of customers and collect data on viewing behaviors. That information could then be used to eventually target advertisements or other marketing materials to subscribers. "It's no different than Facebook or Google," Farnsworth said. "The more we understand our fans, the more we can target them."

Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer. The number of tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada last year declined slightly, while box office revenue rose just 2 percent thanks to pricier tickets, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group. The cost of a ticket has almost doubled in the last two decades, according to the website Box Office Mojo. The average price is about $8.89 this year, though it can be much higher in some cities.

MoviePass was founded in 2011, originally with a business model similar to a gym membership. The company hoped to turn profit from subscribers who paid $30 or more per month but didn't use the service often enough to justify the cost. Lowe, a fixture of the home video business who helped get Netflix off the ground and served as president of rental-kiosk operator Redbox, was named CEO last year. The privately held company declined to disclose subscriber numbers or financial information. Lowe said the data-based business model is still "years in the future."

article...

I like it. Get you in the door and then hit you with the plus seat upgrades. Gourmet food options. Liquor sales etc.

I go to the movies once a year ...

You and I should go together one year.

I go 5-6 times a year. The recliners and beer makes it more enjoyable now. Also its one of the few places I can turn my phone off, and just enjoy the movie. At home, I find myself looking at the phone far to much these days.

That is a good point, but beer and such at the movies is far too expensive around here.

I did not read that in depth so I am confused - I am 99% sure they would sell out at MUCH larger price than 10 bucks so why make it only 10 bucks? Just for the shock value?

Great idea, all the little kids sitting behind you will love this.

You need to read the fine print.... It's not mentioned in this article. If you cancel there are a lot of fees, etc.

It's a bro-date!

I used to go to the cinema 2 or 3 times a week, but in recent years the quality of TVs has surpassed most local screens. I would much rather sit in front of an 80" 4K QLED with a beer and snacks, not having to listen to idiots talking or pissing about texting and if i need to take a piss i can pause the DVD and not miss anything. Im not worried about waiting a few weeks or months for the film to come out on DVD. It seems like the gap between a cinema release and the DVD release is becoming shorter and shorter ?

When I did read the "headline" I thought: " hey like when Netflix started", then I read the post itself and see that it is run by former Netflix executive...

....it is the exactly same model....

In its inception Netflix charged $ 9.95 and you could rent as many DVDs you wanted. Max 3 on one rental....with 3 day shipping and 3 day watching, one could rent about 12 to 15 DVDs/month and Netflix was loosing money. But as the "cheap deal" became known, everybody bought the package and Netflix was loosing even more money.....

Was it a bad business model ??? It appeared so but the Netflix folks knew better....

After a while the novelty did wear off and the 15 x a month rental guy, become 7 x a month, then 2 x and after a while it went down to 0 x month, yet the monthly fee was so low that very few subscribers cancelled. At this height of DVD rental craziness, where almost nobody rented anything, Netflix had about 10,000,000 subscribers... Grossing 100,000,000 month.

This guy wants to do the same thing 20 years later with a movie tickets....:thumbsup

Genius idea to get folks to hit the movies more. The snacks and upsells will make the theaters a killing!

I wanna go see IT

I'd take advantage of this idea for sure. We go to the movies a few times a month and it adds up.

movie pass did this a few years back. We tried it for a couple months, and had major hassles with their technology.
The theater treated us like scammers, they held us at the boxoffice and would not let us enter, then finally after the manager spent 30 minutes on the phone we were allowed in.

We tried again later in the week and then we were not allowed in and they redirected us to the $2 theater that was showing stuff that was available on our cable as pay per view.
If it works now as advertised that would be great.

I only have time for porn

Did this last year for 12 months when it was $35 per person, per month.

It worked very well, zero complaints. 1 movie a week covered costs, anything over was essentially free (minus snacks). Some of the local theaters were very
well upgraded with excellent food. I very rarely saw a movie where the theater wasn't 2/3rds full.

$10 pm for the same would be a steal.