Auge y caída de MoviePass

A crisply edited, easy to follow documentary tracing the inception, initial years, popular explosion and subsequent implosion of an innovative business model within the film industry ecosystem. Candid interviews with almost all of the key personalities make for a very interesting story that tells the all-too-familiar saga of how a single business proposition can evolve in all manner of unexpected directions based on the individual goals and ideas of whoever is at the helm of a business at any given point in its evolution. Those interested in general business practices and/or movies in general are likely to be highly engaged.

Classic before-and-after tale of a company's glory days under the founders before corporate egos come in and drive it into the ground. MoviePass, MovieCrash concerns the ill-fated MP subscription service that allowed members to attend multiple screenings for a flat monthly fee. Kind of like the Netflix formula, but for actual theatergoers.

In this case glory days is relative since the business model was not sustainable to begin with. The founders seem indifferent to having lost 'only' a few $100K per month when compared to the $30Mil burn rate of their hedge fund-backed successors, but to me that almost misses the point. Yes one was embarrassing while the other was downright absurd, but neither was poised for success. After all, the concept of all-you-can-eat should be used as a temporary bridge rather than a long-term plan, and any company whose survival relies on users NOT taking advantage of why they signed up is doomed no matter who's at the helm- be it the charming founders, the greedy businessmen or any of their acolytes. In hindsight the blame game appears even more trivial given that MoviePass went bankrupt in January 2020; would the pandemic not have wiped them out regardless?

I would have been ok had the filmmakers left it there, but they do favor one side over the other (you can guess which one) and romanticize their journey as they prepare for a re-launch today. So it could be worth your time to see how persuasively that argument is made. Otherwise I'd just lump MoviePass in with all the other victims of streaming (there've been too many) and this film as one long commercial for what they plan to do next. I do hope they make it because I still treasure going out to the movies, but I doubt I'd go for this one.

I was just about to sign up for MoviePass in 2018 when it started to have "issues" and started changing its terms and conditions. And, then there were stories about regular users getting 'throttled' so they couldn't access the service.

Muta 'Ali's HBO Documentary takes a pretty standard approach with talking heads, clips etc.. What it does have in its favor is access to several of the key players in the saga including the two original founders, Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, and the man who aced them out of their own company, Mitch Lowe. Things came all crashing down when Lowe brought in Ted Farnsworth (he did not co-operate in this film).

While there is no doubt that having so many principals on the record (including investors, former employees and customers), it does seem as if Ali didn't press them enough. It takes almost 40 minutes for the filmmakers to clearly state the obvious flaw in the MoviePass model - how can you give away more in services (movie tickets) than you take in in subscriptions - and still make a profit? The other big ominous cloud in the story is the mysterious investment firm Hudson Bay. That angle,too, is pressed hard enough.

The documentary does the basics here, but little more. Co-founder Spikes bought the company back from bankruptcy and it's still hanging around today, but nowhere never the level it had at it's peak. The issue remains the same - large profits seem nearly impossible to attain unless either: A. A bunch of your subscribers DON'T use your service. Or, B. The movie theater chains give MoviePass discounted tickets (of course, the chains' decided to just start their own subscriber services).

This is probably one of the most infamous company downfalls in recent history, and it's a great story to tell; yet I wanted more.

There are a lot of talking heads with different perspectives, including most of the former board members; yet I feel I didn't see the whole picture.

We are told how the original team came to be and the rise of what would've been considered the standard for movie going experiences. A proper subscription service where you can see any film, any theater anytime. Ideal and I think it would've been a good thing to continue. ESP with cinemas becoming less valued these days.

We saw the back and forth between AMC, investors.

We then switch once the newer CEO's come in Remove the founders and begin a campaign that would eventually crush themselves under their own weight.

While I was engaged and enjoyed the breezy feel of this doc I felt like there was things left unsaid. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what Maybe they had NDA's they couldn't break at the moment.

Mitch Lowe comes across as a man who simply made mistakes, far from it. Pure slime along with Ted Farnsworth.

The ultimate revelation comes in when it's revealed that this was a fraud scheme from the get go.

And how they let the system go down while embezzling funds from the venture capital group.

But by the time we get to the meat of what went wrong, it's over.

Maybe it really was a, what you see is what you get.

I don't know. I feel that they stretched it out more than what was needed. And more could've been said on what the core of movie pass was. How the software worked and why they didn't hire more staff.

Worth a watch, but don't expect a huge revelation from it. More of a cliff notes of history.

MoviePass continues to be an object of fascination. Even though I was never a customer or investor, I found this doc engrossing.

It adds some new info to the saga I never realized, namely that the two founders were black and the problem started when they had to find investors to keep their business going. White investors and white guys to run the company (and claim they founded it). Turns out they were incompetent and/or stock manipulators, oops.

However, there's more to the story than this. What was the business model of the original founders? Was that ever viable? They racked up a mere 20,000 subscribers in 10 years because they were charging a reasonable price for an unlimited movie pass: $50. That's not viable, and dropping it off a cliff to $10 sure wasn't but was there ever a price point where this would have worked?

I also recall that MoviePass did have some dealings with the theater chains to get them on board with MoviePass as marketing or data collection. The upshot was, the theater chains stole the idea and made their own passes. This is never mentioned at all. If the theater chains could have stolen the idea at any time and cut MoviePass out, then there was never a viable business in the first place, so this is a huge omission.

Now that MoviePass is back in the hands of the original founder (not a spoiler; that was reported in the business press), he has the chance to show this idea can work. The site shows some reasonably priced plans like $10 for 3 movies (as long as you're not in NYC or SoCal, where the price is double!!!) so it does offer some discount over regular pricing but hardly enough to get anyone's pulse up.

The irony is that now theaters are in serious trouble, with too few big hit movies coming out and theaters going empty. Maybe now the theater chains won't snub MoviePass, if it became a way to discount tickets in theaters that are going to sit empty anyway.

Subject matter: 10; documentary: 6, averages out to an 8.