Financially speaking, movie theaters are treading water. With the Netflix model working exceptionally well, and movie tickets scaling upwards of $15 at some locations, less and less people are going to see movies at the local Cinema. Netflix Co-Founder Mason Lowe has come up with a solution to fix this: MoviePass.
MoviePass, originally founded in 2011, started with a tiered business model which largely depended on your location, running from $15 per month to $50 per month for unlimited movies. MoviePass found out the hard way that people wanted to pay less than that. Lowe, who became MoviePass CEO last year, unveiled their newest plan: $9.99 for one month’s worth of movie tickets. The catch? You’re limited to one movie per day, the theater has to accept debit cards and you cannot watch IMAX or 3D screenings, the latter of which is on the decline anyway.
Lowe spoke to Bloomberg on the matter, stating that the “high price of tickets” is what is to blame for the theater industry’s decline, not competition from avenues such as Netflix or Prime Video:
People really do want to go more often…They just don’t like the transaction.
To offset any potential losses from subsidizing movie-goers habits, publicly traded New York-based data firm, Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. bought a majority stake in MoviePass.
Helios and Matheson CEO stated that the goal is to “amass a large base of customers and collect data on their viewing behaviors” to potentially be used to target advertisements or other marketing materials to subscribers:
It’s no different than Facebook or Google, the more we understand our fans, the more we can target them.
Editor’s Note: Oh man, this is beyond amazing. For $10 per month, I can see any movie I want? The insane cost of movie tickets in New York City usually prevents me from going to see movies I really want to see at times, but with MoviePass, that most definitively changes the game. I expect lower income movie enthusiasts to take full advantage of this if they can.
