MoviePass is a service that’s been around for a few years now, where you pay a monthly flat rate, and then you can go to see as many movies in the theater as you want.
It has just slashed its monthly cost from $50 to just $9.95. So, you can see as many movies as you want for roughly the cost of one ticket. Or less than one ticket in a lot of areas.
There are a few minor catches. You can only go to one movie per day, and it doesn’t include premium theaters like IMAX and 3-D. Also, not every theater accepts MoviePass, although the company says 91% of them DO.
Not surprisingly, MoviePass.com got slammed, and for most of yesterday the whole site was down. And there’s a chance this deal might be too good to be true.
AMC is already threatening to block MoviePass over the price cut. They’re accepting it now and like all the other theaters that accept the service, they still get the full price of the ticket.
MoviePass covers the full price, every time. In the past, they’ve made up the difference through marketing partnerships with theaters for concessions and selling user data about their movie going habits and stuff like that.
But AMC says that this $10 thing is unsustainably cheap, and that it will make consumers devalue the movie-going experience.
In other words, they think it’ll fall apart and then people will be even more angry about paying $10 to $20 to see a movie, when they used to be able to see movies for, well, free.
For now, it’s unclear whether or not they’ll be able to stop accepting MoviePass.
For what it’s worth, the average price of a movie ticket is $8.84. Meanwhile, summer revenue at the box office is down 12.4% compared to last year, and could finish down 15%, and movie theaters are losing a ton of money.
