006 The MoviePass Issue

Founded in 2011, MoviePass was met with immediate resistance upon its beta test in the San Fransisco area.  The service didn't really take off on a national level until June of 2016 when Mitch Lowe became the new CEO.  He brought his years of experience at Netflix and Redbox to MoviePass and the subscription service introduced some tiered pricing and by the end of 2016 there were 20,000 subscribers.  Then, in 2017, the analytics firm Helios and Matheson bought a majority stake in the company and the movie theatre industry was officially disrupted.  MoviePass dropped the monthly price to the cost of a movie ticket and by the end of the 2017 had over 1 million subscribers.  At the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, MoviePass announced they would now start co-aquiring films for theatrical distribution.  But, how sustainable is this business model?

Founded in 2011, MoviePass was met with immediate resistance upon its beta test in the San Fransisco area.  The service didn’t really take off on a national level until June of 2016 when Mitch Lowe became the new CEO.  He brought his years of experience at Netflix and Redbox to MoviePass and the subscription service introduced some tiered pricing and by the end of 2016 there were 20,000 subscribers.  Then, in 2017, the analytics firm Helios and Matheson bought a majority stake in the company and the movie theatre industry was officially disrupted.  MoviePass dropped the monthly price to the cost of a movie ticket and by the end of the 2017 had over 1 million subscribers.  At the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, MoviePass announced they would now start co-aquiring films for theatrical distribution.  But, how sustainable is this business model?