MoviePass, Inc was the hottest startup to disrupt Hollywood since Netflix Inc, a magical red card that would let you see a movie a day, with no limits, for only US$10 a month (less than the cost of a single ticket in most markets).
It was the brainchild of young, black entrepreneurs Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, built carefully and cautiously over nearly a decade as a subscription service that would allow theaters to sell leftover tickets at a discount.
During its brief, but undeniable moment in the sun, circa 2017 to 2018, it was such a good deal that it brought back audiences who had all but abandoned the theatrical experience in favor of streaming.
However, Spikes and Watt were pushed out of the company by older, white venture capitalists Mitchell Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, who introduced the US$10/month price point and, in doing so, steered the company into a ditch in roughly a year. Put simply, the company lost too much money, with no real way to make it back. Spikes reacquired and relaunched MoviePass in 2021, with price points that range from US$10 for up to two movies, to US$30 for up to four movies a month.
It was the greatest thing ever. Until it was not.
That story of race, power and the failure of an idea that was good in theory is told in Muta’Ali’s documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash, which premiered on Max on Wednesday.
It is a compelling look at the past, and as the public once again questions the necessity of the theatrical model, it is a reminder that exhibitors must think outside the box if they want audiences to keep movie-going as part of their regular media diet.
The film industry is certainly in need of help.
Despite the recent successes of movies such as Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick, between 2017 and 2022, the percentage of adults in the US who went to the movies declined from 58.6 percent to 43.1 percent, a 2022 study from the National Endowment for the Arts found. Sure, COVID-19 lockdowns had a lot to do with the drop, but even theaters back at full operation have struggled to get attendance back to pre-pandemic levels.
“The movie industry needs to focus on one thing: subscription,” Spikes said at a panel following the South by Southwest (SXSW) premiere of the documentary.
Without it, “what you have is kind of like hotels and airlines before you had Expedia and Travelocity, and these things that were aggregators who filled in the inventory,” Spikes added.
With so many unsold tickets at several screenings per day at thousands of movie theaters, “the industry has an inventory problem. They’re flying 747s with 20 people on them,” he said.
He is right to an extent; subscriptions are a path forward. Several theater chains — such as AMC Theaters, Regal Cinemas and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema — figured that out and launched their own in-house, MoviePass-style subscription services. The price points vary depending on what state or city you are in and have other restrictions, but they are comparable to MoviePass 2.0.
As for his contention that the industry’s sole focus should be on subscriptions? Well, that is something the creator of a subscription service would say. There is no skeleton key that magically returns movie-going levels to 2018 when MoviePass was literally giving movie tickets away.
The latest version of his company certainly would not do it. It is a convoluted system of monthly credits that would make many potential subscribers’ eyes glaze over, at least in comparison to the one-movie-a-day simplicity of the former model.
Simplicity leads to customer loyalty, and that is what is needed to compete against the convenience of streaming a movie from the comfort of your home.
If you have the card, you are loyal to that theater (or more likely, chain), and you attend frequently to maximize the value of your subscription. (Also, you buy lots of concessions, which is pure profit.)
“It provides audiences a way to see things that they might not see,” said Bryan Braunlich, executive director of the industry’s nonprofit organization, the Cinema Foundation, at the SXSW panel. “At a certain price point, we will see things even if they have really bad reviews … if things are at the right subscription price or the right value proposition, you start begetting behavior.”
Those habits would come in handy this year as the theatrical release calendar starts to feel the weight of last year’s months-long actors’ and writers’ strikes. Studios had to shut down production and plan to push projects into next year, which could create a pipeline problem for theaters.
Pressure would also increase on distributors and theaters to further “event-ize” the movies that remain on schedule, via both releases concocted as big events (such as the Taylor Swift and Beyonce concert movies) or a more organic phenomenon, such as “Barbenheimer.” Executives and marketing teams should use the production delays to think about how to recreate those moments for future releases.
The utility and ubiquity of theatrical movie-going has certainly decreased, and it might never get back to its golden days, but “going to the movies” is still very much with us. It is just going to require several strategies working at once to keep audiences in the habit of frequent attendance.
Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, the Playlist, Slate and Rolling Stone. He is the author of Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It.
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