After months of lagging subscribers and a number of stories about how users feel the company worked to limit their ability to even see movies, MoviePass is finally shutting down. It’s a move that many saw coming, especially given the controversies it generated and the evaporating user base, but MoviePass emailed subscribers on Friday and announced that it would cease operations a day later.
Those that were actually emailed pale in comparison to the subscriber pool the company once had, though. And Helios and Matheson, the group that owned MoviePass, also released a statement about MoviePass’s demise on Friday.
On September 13, 2019, MoviePass notified its subscribers that it would be interrupting the MoviePass service for all its subscribers effective September 14, 2019, because its efforts to recapitalize MoviePass have not been successful to date.
MoviePass briefly went on an abrupt hiatus earlier in 2019, but the final death knell is a far cry from the skyrocketing user pool the company grew in its early years when it offered customers access to a movie a day for as low as $10 bucks a month. Given the cost of seeing movies, especially in bigger cities, the deal was an absolute steal that quickly saw the company grow well past the point where it could scale things properly.
A number of factors led to the swift fall of MoviePass, starting with the fact that it burned through venture capital money far quicker than it could become profitable because of its low price point. That led to a number of different measures the company allegedly took to limit users seeing movies, including a blackout of Avengers: Infinity War showings that was uncovered in a long and juicy article in Business Insider earlier in the summer. A feud with AMC didn’t help things, either.
The company apparently will seek funding to kickstart MoviePass once more, but there’s no telling if that will work. AMC Stubs, meanwhile, continues to grow and had four times the subscribers of MoviePass as of earlier in 2019.
