MoviePass Is Trying To Save Movie Theaters, But It Needs To Save Itself First (HBO)
Posted
July 23, 2018
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July 23, 2018
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2,408
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4:33Now PlayingMovie theater attendance is the lowest it’s been since 1995. But a company called MoviePass is trying to fix that.
Mitch Lowe is the CEO of MoviePass– and as the co-founder of Netflix, he’s partially to blame for movie theaters underperforming.
“You know people have got to get out of this cocooning phase and into the experiential, “ says Lowe.
A subscription to MoviePass lets you see a movie a day, for ten bucks a month.
The math is simple: when MoviePass started in 2011, it cost up to 50 dollars per month, depending on where you lived. At the time, the average price of a movie ticket in the US was about $8 dollars, meaning you’d have to see seven movies a month to get the most out of your subscription.
But when the company dropped prices to $10 last August, the price to see one movie evened out to about the same price as the pass itself, and you got to see an unlimited number of movies a month.
Not surprisingly– subscriptions jumped from twenty thousand to over three million.
But Lowe wants to disrupt your movie-going experience altogether.
“The reason we're able to offer you at extraordinarily low price is because we're going to monetize the data to sell you things to create kind of an Open Table for your “night at the movies,” says Lowe, “So we’ll be working with restaurants and bars and build deals...and of course we’ll make a percentage of the revenue that you would spend there.”
Despite Lowe’s confidence in the business model, the stock of MoviePass’s parent company, a big data company called Helios and Matheson (HMNY), is tanking to a current low of $00.11 a share. HMNY has unveiled a plan to raise a billion dollars from investors, and do what’s called a reverse stock split, which could temporarily boost the stock price.
Shareholders will meet and write MoviePass's next scene–or its ending– on Monday.
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