A Timeline of MoviePass’s Bumpy History

December 2014: After a worrisome year in movie attendance, AMC grudgingly enters into a partnership with MoviePass, which until then had been swatted away by major theater chains. “It frankly wouldn’t be smart to ignore the success of subscription in other areas of media,” Christina Sternberg, senior vice president for corporate strategy at AMC, said in a Times interview.

August 2017: The alliance breaks when MoviePass drops its price to $9.95 a month. More than 150,000 new users sign up in just two days following the announcement — crashing the service’s website and app — and AMC responds by saying MoviePass users are “not welcome here.” “In AMC’s view, that price level is unsustainable and only sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road,” the company writes in a statement. MoviePass also catches the eye of the data firm Helios and Matheson Analytics, which buys a controlling stake in the company for $27 million.

December 2017: The price drop pays off in the short term, as a million new subscribers sign up within just four months. Mitch Lowe, the company’s C.E.O., tells The Times that the venture will succeed by collecting and selling data about the tastes and habits of consumers, particularly millennials, who make up 75 percent of subscribers.

April 2018: The subscriber base approaches three million people. But cracks begin to emerge, as customers complain about glitches, shifts in service and extensive delays in membership card arrivals. An auditor even expresses “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern,” while Helios, at this point, has lost $20 million a month since September. But if company leaders are fazed, they aren’t showing it: “I’m not worried about the viability of MoviePass at all,” Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of Helios and Matheson, told The Times. “We have plenty of money to get through the next year.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/movies/moviepasss-timeline.html?partner=rss&emc=rss