Editorial: Moviepass, Get Your Shit Together.

For months, I’ve been an outspoken champion of Moviepass. Half of the reason you are seeing an influx of movie reviews from me is because of Moviepass. For those of you not in the know, Moviepass is an app where you spend $9.99 a month to see any first run movie. Originally, Moviepass was $49.99 a month, but they took the price down in exchange for location information.

The original deal with Moviepass was that you could see any movie you want, as many times as you want, so long as it was a 2D screening and you checked into your movie theater of choice the moment you got there.

I’m not big on 3D or IMAX, so this was perfect for me. However, one begins to wonder how one sustains a business model like this at $9.95/month, given the average movie ticket cost in 2018 is $9.16/month. How is Moviepass going to sustain it’s current model if you’re only getting 79 cents per subscriber?

But then in recent months, Moviepass made some drastic changes. It started off with that you couldn’t repeat watch a movie. Very understandable. I paid with my own money to watch Avengers: Infinity War a second time anyway.

Then you had to take a picture of your ticket, because apparently people were buying concessions. OK, so story time on this. Moviepass mistakenly listed one of the XD screenings of A Quiet Place on their 2D times. I wasn’t able to get that ticket and instead went to the showing after. I want those people’s Moviepass cards damn it!

Just recently, Moviepass introduced surge charging. When I think of this term, I think of a busy movie theater. Surge charging is exactly how Uber and Lyft make their money. There are only so many Uber and Lyft drivers on the road. But let’s say Bro McCountryasshole comes to Huntington Center. Uber and Lyft is going to charge heavily in that area because of the basic concept of supply and demand.

While I understand that I went to see Teen Titans GO! To the Movies on a prescreening day (Thursday), Franklin Park Mall’s movie theater at 4 PM was practically dead. As I walked in, I pictured tumbleweeds. That’s before I walked into the auditorium playing Teen Titans GO! To the Movies. There were only 9 people at that showing. Why the fuck did I have to pay $3.40 extra for movie that I really didn’t like; that really didn’t have much positive buzz until its inexplicably fresh Tomatometer rating? That is the very definition of a ripoff. There was no supply and no demand.

So on Friday morning, I went to go see Mission: Impossible – Fallout because I really needed to see something that was adult. Imagine my surprise when I see Mission: Impossible – Fallout completely blacked out. This is the movie I would completely understand paying a surge charge for. No surge charge. No nothing. Every showing was blacked out. Fortunately, I caught the early bird screening for $6. But I was fuming at that point and I had already made the trip to the theater. I thought it was just me, but here is an article confirming this. I’m in the middle of writing my review of it as we speak.

So Moviepass, you want to be solvent? Raise your goddamn prices. Be petty and match AMC’S $19.95 a month by giving your original offer as $19.95 a month. As of today, Moviepass is pretty much a penny stock, trading at 98 cents a share. So what if you lose entitled millenials who only want to pay $9.95 a month? You have a viable service. Believe me, if there was an AMC near me, I’d drop your ass and pay the $19.99 a month for their plan. You’re lucky Cinemark’s $8.99 a month plan is a goddamn joke. OOOO, I can spend $3 instead of $5 for a large pop! ONE FREE 2D TICKET A MONTH!

I’m just going to say this point blank: if you don’t get your shit together in a month, I’m dropping your ass like the featured picture I found on Twitter. Don’t blame it on us because you funded Gotti, John Travolta’s third 0% on Rotten Tomatoes movie. Would there have been any blackout dates or surge charging for that movie if it were still in theaters right now?

I was going to end this on the last paragraph.

Welp, it looks like I’m cancelling Moviepass sooner than later because as of today, this is all of my area movie theaters I frequent in the Toledo area under Moviepass: