Movie lovers rejoice: the legendary, short-lived subscription service is set to return next month. With MoviePass, users can once again pay a monthly subscription, with multiple payment tiers, to receive free tickets to the movie theater of their choice.
The short-lived national sensation, MoviePass, will launch its new beta on Labor Day of this year with a three-tiered subscription model. According to Deadline, users will be able to pay $10, $20, or $30 a month to receive a different amount of credits that can be used at a movie theater to receive a free ticket to the movie of their choice. Unlike the subscription service's previous iteration, users will not be able to watch an unlimited number of movies with their subscription, as reported by Business Insider.
Registration opens at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on August 25, when users can sign up for the waitlist on their website. It will remain open for five days, and on Labor Day the first lucky registrants will be asked to choose one of the three subscription plans on a first-come-first-served basis. Earlier this year, Deadline spoke to Stacy Spikes, MoviePass's co-founder who was fired as CEO when the company was purchased in 2018 and bought the company himself in 2021 after it had gone bankrupt. “We’re going to make mistakes,” Spikes said of the re-launch. “We’re not going to get it right out of the box. It’s going to be trial and error.” Spikes is of course being realistic, but such talk doesn't inspire confidence given MoviePass' rocky history.
MoviePass was founded in 2011 by Spikes and Hamet Watt, and after years of stumbling, it was bought out by the analytics firm Helios and Matheson in 2017. Immediately, Helios and Matheson rolled out a new business model that allowed users to pay only $9.95 per month to watch up to one movie every single day. However, the service was a mess, and constant changes left users bewildered and frustrated.
In April 2018 the plan that allowed users to watch an unlimited number of movies per month was removed, only to be reinstated two weeks later. In June of 2018, MoviePass added surge fees for movies during peak times, meaning that users had to pay an additional charge of up to $6 for each movie, virtually defeating the purpose of the subscription. And despite claims that MoviePass could be used at any theater in the United States, some major chains like AMC Theaters refused to accept MoviePass tickets.
Despite all these hiccups, however, MoviePass became a national sensation in 2017 and 2018, and subscription numbers skyrocketed, from 20,000 in December 2016 to 3 million by June 2018. Even if the execution of the service was flawed, the deal seemed just too good to be true, and indeed it was—by 2019 the service was discontinued and in 2020 the company filed for bankruptcy.
MoviePass registration opens on August 25, and the service launches for the first batch of subscribers on Labor Day, September 5.
Source: Deadline, Business Insider