A few months ago, I tried to work out what the business model of MoviePass (and putative UK equivalent cPass) might be.
I concluded that the operators were going to need very deep pockets, and there was absolutely no certainty that the model works.
And that seems to have been an accurate prediction. The service recently nearly ran out of money, and had an emergency $5m injection last week. As Techcrunch reports, that wasn’t enough for the operators to block MoviePass subscribers from buying tickets to the weekend’s big new release – Mission Impossible: Fallout. And according to reports from a company meeting, the same restrictions will apply to some forthcoming big releases.
With the share price of MoviePass’ owner falling like a stone to below $1, the outlook is not good. I would imagine that at this point, the owners will be looking at some kind of fire sale. But even that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
In the meantime AMC has launched its own subscription sevice – AMC Stubs A-List – which might be a mouthful, but offers three films a week for $19.95 a month. That puts it on a par with long standing subscription schemes in the UK like Cineworld’s Unlimited or Odeon’s Limitless offerings.
It’s unclear where that leaves cPass. They continue to offer a “waiting list” system to invite new subscribers. But I suspect that their investors will be carefully monitoring the losses of MoviePass, and may well decide to abandon ship rather than launch a loss-making product of their own.
It was hard to understand the business model of MoviePass in the first place, and that turns out to be because there really wasn’t a workable one. At least there wasn’t a workable one that accurately reflected movie-goers habits at a price point that made sense. All the more so, when MoviePass had deals with neither cinema chains, nor movie distributors.
The film industry does need disruption, but it’s already happening. It’s happening in how we watch films, and the type of films that get made. Most importantly its happening in where we watch films. As was highlighted in the book, The Big Picture it’s happening with Netflix and Amazon. Those mid-budget films are more and more skipping theatres, and showing up on their services. Cinemas are left with blockbusters at one end and art-house films at the other.
Will cinemas as we know them now survive another 10-20 years? I hope so, but I’m not certain. But MoviePass certainly won’t be the game changer it thought it’d be.