Last December when many Fall TV shows were concluding, heading into a winter hiatus, or at the very least taking a short break for the holiday season I signed up for MoviePass. I opted for the annual subscription, which cost me $89.95 at the time. Knowing that the entire service sounded to be too good to be true, and it was possible that MoviePass wouldn’t even make it a year, I was determined to get my money’s worth and see at least nine movies as soon as possible in order to break even.
My goal has always been to be one of those subscribers they lose money on.
Let’s All Go to the Movies!
I have to admit, I had a good run with MoviePass for the first five or six months. It worked and I went to a hell of a lot of movies, which was the entire point of the thing.
For the last several years I’ve tried to see as many of the Best Picture Nominees as possible and this year I actually succeed in large part due to MoviePass. Hell, there was even one week shortly before the Oscars that I saw four films in a seven day span – The Shape of Water, Darkest Hour, The Post, and Annihilation. The only downside was seeing the same trailers over and over and over again.
Even when TV returned, I was still seeing a couple of movies a month. The winter was never-ending in the Northeast this year so I took full advantage of MoviePass. There was no real reason to even entertain the idea of spending time outdoors until like late April / early May.
With MoviePass I saw all the big blockbuster movies like Black Panther, Star Wars Episode VIII, Deadpool 2, and Avengers: Infinity War. But I also saw a lot of smaller pictures I otherwise wouldn’t have gone to the theater for like Thoroughbreds, I, Tonya, and The Spy Who Dumped Me.
I also saw A Quiet Place and Hereditary, which reignited my love of horror films. It’d been a while since I saw a scary movie in theaters and both were just so much fun to see. The experience was fun that is, the movies were just as disturbing and creepy as advertised.
And I even got to cross off a bucket list item, having a theater all to myself, when I saw Action Point late on a Thursday night in June. For the record, that is not a movie I recommend.
So what’s the Catch?
When I initially subscribed to MoviePass the rules and regulations were pretty straightforward: one movie per day, no repeat viewings, and 2D screenings only. All restrictions I could live it. In fact, they even lifted the repeat viewing ban for a bit which allowed me to see Annihilation twice on the big screen.
The only other stipulation was that all tickets for movies had to be purchased in person, the day of the screening. So even though MoviePass was an app-based service, you and your phone had to physically be at the theater in order to buy the tickets. This method obviously had some drawbacks if you wanted to see a movie on a busy opening weekend or were trying to coordinate assigned seats with a group of friends.
Thankfully for me, I still have an old AMC Theater by my house that doesn’t have the nice new recliner seats or even assigned seating for that matter so if I wanted to see a popular movie last minute I knew I could go there without issue.
Many of the early shortcomings or obstacles weren’t an inconvenience to me. According to a survey of MoviePass users conducted by the National Research Group for THR, my movie going habits were on par with other most other subscribers. I was more willing to see movies solo, on weekdays, and even more willing to take a chance on movies with less than stellar reviews. The service worked for me.
There was one small hiccup with the app in February, during the opening weekend of Black Panther, but they refunded me the cost of the ticket that I ended up paying for out of pocket so we were square as far as I was concerned.
Dun Dun Dun
However, big changes and even bigger issues started to develop in July, and that’s when my experience with MoviePass began to sour. It was gradual at first, the service suffered from several outages that were related to money trouble, unlike the technical issues I encountered in the winter. But I was really busy when all of that was doing down, so I figured MoviePass would either sort itself out or go under by the time I would use it again.
Unfortunately neither of those things occurred. When the service came back online, MoviePass began rolling out all sorts of revisions to their terms of service including:
- Peak Pricing
- A Change from Unlimited Movies a Month to 3 Movies a Month
- A Blackout Period for New Releases
- 2 Movies to Choose From Each Day
- 6 Movies to Choose From Each Day (a handful of which are in limited release)
*For more information, here’s a great in-depth and frequently updated timeline of changes to MoviePass from DigitalTrends.com.
My annual pass insulated me from some of the changes, but the app was still being glitchy and available movies and showtimes were disappearing at random during much of July and August, especially in the evenings. For a while it was almost impossible to see a movie after normal work hours. To demonstrate the frustration of trying to use the service, here’s a few screenshots I took of my MoviePass app on August 15th:
As you can see, not only do my movie options change throughout the day at one theater, but they completely vanish within a 45 min time frame at another. I checked the app before leaving work to plan my evening only to see that no showtimes were available by the time I reached my house.
I reached out to MoviePass support via Twitter, or should I say they DMed me after I tweeted a string of passive aggressive tweets about the disappearing movie showtimes; however, I only received canned answers from their FAQ page.
To make matters worse, during all of this wishy washy takesy backsy bullshit, MoviePass was and continues to be terrible at communicating with it’s paying customers about these changes. Email blasts providing vague information about the updates routinely arrive in my inbox after announcements are already making the rounds on the Internet and social media.
For now, the service seems to have somewhat stabilized with its rotating handful of pre-selected movies a day offering. Of course I’m grading on a curve at this point, it’s been a tumultuous summer. I also haven’t tried to see a movie after work so I’m not sure if they’ve sorted out that problem.
I understand that most of these changes were probably deliberate, to curtail paying customers from actually going to the theater in order to save itself money. I mean it’s no secret MoviePass is literally hemorrhaging millions of dollars, but as a user that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
To date I’ve seen 23 movies at five different theaters with my MoviePass so – mission accomplished, but I’m determined to milk it for all its worth until my subscription is up in December. Or until I can actually cancel my pass, since users are having issues with that too.
When MoviePass worked it was fun. But it was indeed too good to be true, so now I’m just riding out this weird experiment until the end of the year or until it goes under, whichever occurs first. And on the bright side, Fall TV is about to return and there’s always Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon if I have the hankering to watch a movie without limitations as to what and when I can watch it.
Update:
My year with MoviePass has finally come to an end. Since I posted this blog, the service only became even more insufferable. Their email blasts continued to ignore the service’s ongoing terribleness (in fact, one was from the “Director of Barketing”) and trying to see a movie was like trying to solve a rubik’s cube. (Assuming you are not one of those people who’s mastered the thing; I can’t solve one to save my life.)
First of all, their pre-selected options for movies were a lot of indie films in limited release or movies you weren’t jonesing to see like Slender Man or The Meg. Then if you found a movie you wanted to see AND it was playing in your local theater, then you had to hope that the day you could go to the movies matched with the day the movie was an available option via MoviePass. Even better yet, assuming all those things happened, MoviePass was still limiting showtime options.
So there were many days including entire weekends were I was greeted with the following message for every nearby theater, of which I have many:
There are no more screenings at this theater today.”
Needless to say I spent most of this Fall trying to see movies with MoviePass and failing every time. I finally broke down and shelled out money from my own pocket to see A Simple Favor and Widows – both of which were great by the way. I knew I already had gotten my money’s worth, but it was the principle of the matter that infuriated me, I was paying for a service that I was no longer receiving.
To add insult to injury, when I tried to game the system by checking in to one of their approved movies in order to buy a ticket to a different movie, a movie I actually wanted to see, I was met with a screen that instructed me to take a picture of my ticket stub in order to verify that I bought the ticket for the movie I checked in to.
Foiled again! Okay, so cheating is uncool, and part of me was like fine good for you closing a loophole that people undoubtedly took advantage of, but what really irked me was that once again a change to the service had been made without communicating it. I was a paying customer, didn’t seem like too much to ask to be informed about the thing I had handed over my hard earned money for.
A couple of times I considered buying the ticket and skipping the verification process, after all, the worst that could happen was that they would cancel my subscription, which felt like my end-game anyways. While tempting, I didn’t go down that road. That’s not to say I never gamed the system, because I did, I just did it prior to them requiring verification. (How else do you think I bought an advanced ticket for Avengers: Infinity War?)
Ultimately, for the last few months of my subscription, MoviePass went unused. It was just an app taking up space on my iPhone, but as I already mentioned I was determined to ride it out until the end. Plus, it became my mission to see at least one more movie before the end, one final “stick it to em” move if you will. And I did, two in fact! It was a Christmas miracle. My last weekend as a MoviePass subscriber I saw Anna and the Apocalypse on a Friday night and a matinee showing of Creed II the following morning. The next day, my subscription was over.
After that I checked my bank account for several days in a row just to make sure that MoviePass hadn’t ignored my cancellation and hit me up for more money. They did not. So that’s the end of my MoviePass story.
Amazingly the service outlasted my subscription, but they still have plenty of woes including possibly being delisted from the stock market. Amidst that news came the announcement of even more pricing changes and subscription plans, but I’m good. No thanks and good riddance.
My impression and experience with MoviePass is about the same as when I first wrote this blog post back in August, it felt like you were getting away with something when it worked and it was exasperating when it didn’t. Couple that with poor customer service and oblivious social media marketing and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. I do appreciate the way MoviePass reignited my love of movies and going to the theater, but I think I’ll be taking my business to AMC. After all, their A-List plan doesn’t seem like such a bad deal anymore.
