Two years after the wildly popular subscription service MoviePass crashed and burned, its co-founder Stacy Spikes is determined to bring it back. Spikes says MoviePass will return this summer.
The company, recently bought by Spikes after his unceremonious ouster from MoviePass in 2018, held its launch event today at the Walter Reade Theater Lincoln Center in NYC. Spikes began by wasting absolutely no time addressing the Helios and Matheson Analytics-shaped elephant in the room. The firm is now infamous for being the parent company of MoviePass that managed to blow the entire thing up shortly after the firm bought the startup, which became famous for offering unlimited movie tickets for a monthly fee.
The company’s original engineering team is returning for the business’s relaunch, according to Spikes, and the service will launch this summer. Under the new model, MoviePass will run on tradable credits that roll over month to month. Subscribers will also be able to use their credits to bring a friend, a markedly different approach from the single-user card system that MoviePass used previously, which could prove annoying for non-cardholders.
Spikes seemed to shrug off existing subscriptions launched by individual theater chains, instead suggesting that MoviePass would offer more options and more flexibility than a single exhibitor could. Since MoviePass folded, plenty of theaters has launched their own power user subscription models that will compete directly with a now-late-to-the-party MoviePass. MoviePass will also have to convince these exhibitors to sign on, something they were initially prickly about in a pre-pandemic market.
A lot has changed for movie theaters since MoviePass shut down in 2019 — and a lot will have to change for MoviePass, too, if it wants this second run to have a better ending.
