The gist of it is, they're hoping to grow so big that movie theaters will have no choice but to negotiate with them, to share part of the revenues they bring theaters from people who normally don't come watch movies on a whim anymore.
Being able to go to a different chain is nice. For example, near home there is Regal theater, but near where everyone hangs out there is an AMC.
I'm considering switching from MoviePass to AMC A-Stubs or whatever it's called, but will lose out on the opportunity to walk to my local theater for a free flick.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to at least 1 movie each month. So MoviePass was a no-brainer. Walking to the theater and watching The Foreigner felt completely free to me. I would never have seen that in theaters. That night I would have been home alone playing games or watching TV.
If you're paying $10 a month, you normally see 1 movie per month, and you're thinking of the monthly fee as paying for that one movie, any additional movies you see are effectively free.
My wife and I were exactly the same way. Only the “event” films were worth seeing in the theatre. Most other movies we would see when they fell off of a truck onto my Plex Server.
We have gone to see a lot more movies this month since we had it. If you see two movies a month you break even. If we see one $17.26 IMAX movie we almost break even.
But more importantly, for us. It is a commitment device. There are a lot of times that life gets busy and my wife and I don’t go out. Now we just get out the house once or twice a week and go to a movie. We can even meet for an extended lunch sometimes since my wife had a split shift during the school year. She’s off during the summer.
This is sort of like Amazon's tactic with ebooks and such. Lose until your volume is high, then when you've cornered that particular market, negotiate a workable cost per unit.
I really hope it works out -- but in all sincerity, I don't see why the theaters themselves aren't just copying this for their chains. MoviePass has already demonstrated the market.
I don't see how it makes sense to copy a strategy that loses money when someone else is already following that strategy and going broke due to all the money they're paying you.
The strategy only loses money because they are paying full-retail price for movie tickets.
AMC's A-List (costs $19.99) does not pay $9-$13 per showing a la MoviePass. They pay the same space/personnel costs per seat they always have. Tickets have never been a theater's largest or most desirable source of revenue.
It was my understanding the ticket price basically covered the film licensing cost, the movie theater made basically zero profit of that. They make their profits off concessions. I don’t know if that’s true still or not, but used to be the case.
They've done this in the UK for at least a decade. The two biggest chains each have an unlimited subscription service. They're both £18 though, so a lot more than moviepass
And to me that means Moviepass has done its job. I subscribed to the annual Moviepass plan, tried to use it last night (which failed, see article), so signed up for the Cinemark Movieclub, which lets me buy tickets online, and days in advance.
Not if they are providing a better customer experience along the way as well as drawing new customers to the market. "Rent-seeking" implies a desire to simply extract cash without providing any value to anyone.
The gist of it is, they're hoping to grow so big that movie theaters will have no choice but to negotiate with them, to share part of the revenues they bring theaters from people who normally don't come watch movies on a whim anymore.