After surviving bankruptcy and some run-ins with The U.S. Department of Justice, among other problems, movie theater subscription plan MoviePass is set to return this summer with an improved business model and some new partnerships, reportedly including Walmart.
On Monday (April 24), Business Insider reported that “The movie-ticket-subscription service that recently relaunched in beta form will soon be available at one of the biggest retailers in the world,” citing “several sources familiar with the deal.”
There’s been no official confirmation yet from either company, but the BI reporting noted that “MoviePass will have displays in Walmart stores across the country where its subscription cards will be available for shoppers, sources said.”
Original MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes announced in a Tweet last August that the company would relaunch in beta and opened a waiting list for subscribers. Spikes bought the company back in 2021 in the wake of its 2020 bankruptcy filing. It’s been quietly operating in beta ahead of a planned nationwide launch in time for the summer blockbuster season.
The new MoviePass has four monthly subscription tiers for national markets priced at $10 for 1-3 films per month, $20 for 3-7 films per month, $30 for 5-11 films per month, and a $40 “Pro” tier offering one movie per day per month. For Southern California and the Metro New York markets, prices are the same except for the Pro tier, priced at $60 per month in those markets.
The new system will limit access based on demand and other factors, and subscribers can’t reserve seats ahead of time but must present their MoviePass card at theaters ahead of showtimes. Numerous published reports have said the kinks are not entirely ironed out yet.
Additionally, the resurrected MoviePass must still contend with competing movie subscriptions, including AMC Stubs A-List, which permits subscribers to see three films a week for $19.95 a month, and the Cinemark Movie Club priced at $9.99 per month for one film per month.
However, whereas AMC, Regal and other theater chains stopped supporting MoviePass previously, the chains are on board with the new version, and the MoviePass website lists hundreds of participating movie theaters, including AMC and Regal, saying there are “more than 4,000 theaters to choose from” under the new pricing structure.
The timing may be fortuitous as streaming services like Netflix — also heavily promoted in Walmart stores — now see theatrical release as an important potential revenue stream.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that “Streaming subscribers should prepare for a new reality — one in which new content isn’t simply fire-hosed onto platforms for artificially low prices. Movies in particular will see a big shift as established media players push more releases into a recovering theatrical industry while some have also started to question the economics of making big-budget movies exclusively for streaming.”
A Brief History of MoviePass
A subscription plan for seeing films in theaters was appealing when it originally debuted in 2011 and took off like a rocket in 2017 after being acquired by now-defunct data firm Helios and Matheson Analytics, headed by Ted Farnsworth, and bringing in Netflix co-founder Mitch Lowe as CEO, at one point claiming three million subscribers paying $9.95 per month to see unlimited films.
However, those unit economics didn’t work in MoviePass’s favor — and theater chains including AMC launched their own subscription plans — which quickly tanked the venture and saw its top executives charged with tampering with consumer’s ability to use the subscription.
Lowe and Farnsworth settled the first suit with the FTC in 2021, only to find themselves the target of a second U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit in November 2022 accusing the duo of trying to deceive investors “through materially false and misleading representations relating to HMNY and MoviePass’s business and operations to artificially inflate the price of HMNY’s stock and attract new investors,” per the Justice Department.
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