I'm Officially an A-Lister
While I wouldn’t exactly call myself an Early Adopter of MoviePass, I was definitely hip to it. For the better part of the last year, I’ve been frequenting movie theaters all over Manhattan and seeing any movie that has the slightest chance of being decent. If MoviePass had a referral program, I would’ve made a killing – I’ve been trying to get everyone I meet to join the service and reap the cinematic benefits. Heck, I even built out a campaign in my portfolio for MoviePass because I thought it deserved more attention than it had. I have been all in.
However, last Thursday, I finally hit the cancel button on my membership. It’s well-documented this week that MoviePass’s impending demise will take place any day now, but this wasn’t as sure of an assumption as of last Thursday. My roommate and I went to see Ant-Man and the Wasp (review coming this week) at the AMC on 84th St and showed up about 10 minutes prior to showtime. When we went to check in on our MoviePass app, we were both greeted with an error message. After doing some researching online, I discovered that MoviePass was down altogether…again. This was certainly not the first time that I had technical issues with my app, but it would be the last. On the spot, my roommate and I both decided to cancel MoviePass and switch over to AMC Stubs A List. In less than 5 minutes, we were both signed up and had our tickets to see Ant-Man.
Little did we know, but the shutdown on Thursday appears to have been the last straw for MoviePass. Investors are already writing the obituary for the transcendent moviegoing service, and, as a proponent of MoviePass for the last year, I felt it important to share my thoughts.
Let me begin by saying that a subscription service with movie tickets is an absolutely brilliant idea. I firmly believe that it’s the future of moviegoing, and companies like AMC are already working to make that happen. With that said, holy cow the people running this company are idiots. To start, $9.99 is just too low of a price point. I would’ve paid at least $20. In New York, an area with more movie theaters than anywhere else, the average ticket is around $16 – going to the movies twice every 3 months was cheaper with MoviePass than it was just buying regular tickets. I would see 5-6 movies a lot of months, so they were regularly taking a $70 a month loss on customers like myself.
Next, there was a clear issue of transparency on MoviePass’s part. By that, I mean that they’re a bunch of liars. There were so many times that the service was “down” when big movies were being released – it was clear that they were just shutting their service down so that they didn’t have to take a huge financial hit of a blockbuster weekend. They recently came out with their surge pricing to combat this issue, and it was clumsily handled, too. Rather than just making big release movies slightly more expensive, they relied on their national algorithm which left people paying surge pricing to sit in empty movie theaters and see movies that had been out for weeks.
They were just clueless. I heard from someone who consulted for them that they were convinced that this service was going to be a huge hit with senior citizens who saw movies during the day – it couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
Enough about MoviePass though, I want to briefly talk about life as an A-Lister. Although it’s more expensive, I already know I’m getting a significantly better product. Anyone who’s skeptical of being an AMC Stubs member clearly hasn’t felt the thrill of getting to cut the line at the concession stand after standing behind that majestic yellow tape. The biggest perk is undoubtedly that I’m able to schedule my tickets ahead rather than showing up. With there being so many AMCs in Manhattan, I know I’ll be able to get a ticket to any movie any time, and never have to worry about showing up early to physically check in. I’m living the good life as an A-Lister, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.