My wife, a Moviepass subscriber, has been to the movies some 60 times since December. She typically goes 30-40 times a year, it's one of her and her friends' favorite hobbies. You might go to coffee or the bar, I might go to the park or the gym, she and her friends love going to the movies. It's just a thing to do for a couple hours on a weeknight.
There was no 'abuse' in the sense of sharing her pass among friends, or buying tickets and not going to the movie. She does like a frozen coke sith her movie, and she buys the $35 free refill popcorn bucket 3 times a year, so there was quite a bit of profit for the theater, but she was not profitable to Moviepass and they might feel that normal use for her was abuse.
She would not be profitable unless (a) Moviepass can negotiate <50-cent tickets with the theater with kickbacks for concessions, or (b) she convinced enough people close to her (like me) to buy a moviepass and buy fewer tickets than the subscription costs.
The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would have spent more on tickets than moviepass.
This is the crux of the problem, I think. People who see one movie a month are not going to buy it. So they need to be profitable for high-usage customers. Unless they are getting incredible discounts... just not going to work.
For it to make sense, there need to be some restrictions -- e.g., only Sunday through Thursday nights (times when fewer people go to the movies... whatever they might be). But then a lot of people like me, who are too busy to go at that time, will skip it.
If you want me to over-pay for an option, it needs to have some intangible value. For example, if buying a moviepass gave me X times a month that someone else could come "free"... I might value that above market cost, because I could tell others "don't sweat it, it's free" and get friends to come along without feeling I'm pressuring them to spend a lot of money.
This seems much closer to simply comparing dollar costs of two different purchase alternatives.
Avengers, TLJ, Black Panther, Greatest Showman are all movies that someone can enjoy watching more than once.
It's not possible to draw conclusions about how many people were "abusing" the service without a lot more information.
If this model works, it isn’t exactly hard for a large chain like AMC to do in house at all, I really don’t see the incentive to get into bed with MoviePass. Some European cinema chains already do this, like Cineworld in the UK.
You must be very unfamiliar with modern movie audiences, especially comic book movie fans. Plenty of people see movies they're fans of multiple times after release.
It appears from comments below that you personally don't like watching the same movie over again. Other people, however, do. Your personal bias is skewing your ability to understand the situation.
What's actually going on is that the service customers have paid for is being reduced while the price hasn't changed, screwing the customers.
Unless you can get the vendors who sell theaters the digital film to reduce their prices for new releases, there is still an intrinsic cost to the movie itself that isn't going to be defeated by a small increase in snack purchases. Actually, I hear this being a big selling point (increased snack sales), but of the 5 people I know who use MoviePass, 4 of them sneak snacks in via purses. Anecdotal as it may be, I don't trust this reasoning to be a theater's savior either.
http://mobi.odeon.co.uk/limitless/
I don't go to the cinema often enough to make it worthwhile but it is popular with my peers.
> ... whose astounding box-office performance is driven by repeat visits
I think you underestimate how often people will see the same movie.
Getting tickets for your friends for MoviePass is a whole separate issue (and clearly abuse). But is seeing the same movie more than once "abuse"? That's more debatable. But repeat viewings clearly happen.
A lot of services depend on individual usage staying in certain bounds, and which would rarely be exceeded by the typical, intended usage; but where the provider doesn't want to commit to a hard cap (cough ISPs, Github). These services would collapse if everyone started re-selling the good, because it vastly changes the use profile. The term "abuse" is understandable (if not always warranted).
But you're right: one individual seeing the movie more than once is not inherently "abusive", even in that sense. But reselling is, for sure: the typical user is not going to see a movie every day, and the MoviePass model is based on such a "gentlemen's agreement", where people won't go out of their way to use every day's ticket (except the rare oddball user).
As a way to root out actual abuse, they have to use some crude heuristics, and one of them is repeat movie viewings. Yes, some honest non-resellers see movies more than once, but the most common case is this kind of reselling.
Thing is, MoviePass subscribers aren't representative of the average movie-goer. It attracts those who see a lot of movies (repeat or not). It's also only a small percentage of viewers.
The problem is the corporate doublespeak (lies) in the the way they presented the change. It speaks volumes about the way the company is managed. I'd be looking elsewhere if I worked there. Especially considering that there is absolutely no reason to spin the change. Just call it what it is.
I just logged into MP last weekend and there was a pop-up reminding us that accounts were not to be shared in addition to the new, "you can only see a movie once" rule. Total speculation, but my guess is that a good chunk of that was people sharing accounts.
That said, I love MoviePass but know it's not sustainable. I wish they had rolled out these changes earlier. Something like no repeat viewings, 8 movies per month, different price depending on where you live (tickets at my theater are only $9 normally), etc, could have made this thing much more sustainable, and still probably had most of the growth.
Foreshadowing is all over in movies, as well as artifacts of cut subplots/scenes. Re: /r/moviedetails
Abuse is likely a big factor but there are likely some honest actors in there too.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were people (especially those that buy MoviePass, I'd expect them to be movie fans) that see big blockbusters two or three times. But yeah at 35% savings that's gotta be largely abuse.
(cut me some slack in 1999 Star Wars had a ton of goodwill and excitement built up, we couldn't know what the Prequel Era would end up being :)
Because of that, MoviePass recently began requiring people to take photos of the tickets they buy. This introduced a new step to the process: now, you need to buy a ticket, take a photo for MoviePass, and then exchange it for the ticket you actually want.
> There are a lot of ways to read that percentage, and in MoviePass’ defense, the company has also said that the goal was to prevent people from using MoviePass to buy tickets for friends who aren’t subscribers. But either way, a savings of more than a third represents a radical shift. Couple that with the fact that the most popular movie the first week of May was Avengers: Infinity War, whose astounding box-office performance is driven by repeat visits, and the connection seems clearer — MoviePass is openly trying to save money by limiting features its customers actively use. It isn’t a “test” or an “experiment,” as the company has claimed in the past; it’s intentionally making the subscriptions people have already paid for less useful because its business model is unsustainable.
Getting rid of repeats saving 35% seems to point to some pretty widespread abuse. Who are these people seeing the same movie multiple times during its initial theater run?