Gone are the days where prospective moviegoers would roll up to the theaters and gawk at the board for their next watch. Theaters are trying to make up that business in other ways.
There was a company called MoviePass that did go bankrupt because they were basically paying people to go to movies.
They didn’t negotiate deals with the theater chains or movie studios to give discounts to their members in exchange for more total customers. The studios want to sell more tickets and the theaters want to sell more popcorn, after all. No, what they did was basically issue people debit cards that could only be used at movie theaters. Customers would pay a flat monthly fee and then MoviePass would pay full price for as many movie tickets as the customers wanted.
Their business model relied on most of their customers under-utilizing the service like a gym membership. That’s the only way it would have worked. No one would pay for the service if it didn’t at least theoretically save them money, “I can watch 10 movies for the price of 7”, and the thing is most of their customers fully utilized their service. People who go to the movies a lot were the only one who heard about it.
There was a company called MoviePass that did go bankrupt because they were basically paying people to go to movies.
They didn’t negotiate deals with the theater chains or movie studios to give discounts to their members in exchange for more total customers. The studios want to sell more tickets and the theaters want to sell more popcorn, after all. No, what they did was basically issue people debit cards that could only be used at movie theaters. Customers would pay a flat monthly fee and then MoviePass would pay full price for as many movie tickets as the customers wanted.
Their business model relied on most of their customers under-utilizing the service like a gym membership. That’s the only way it would have worked. No one would pay for the service if it didn’t at least theoretically save them money, “I can watch 10 movies for the price of 7”, and the thing is most of their customers fully utilized their service. People who go to the movies a lot were the only one who heard about it.
People loved movie pass. It was great, for them. Not remotely sustainable though.
Yeah it was wonderful of them to use venture capital to send so many people to the movies.