IS IT A BOON FOR BUSY MOVIE FANS?
I had put off getting a MoviePass card, the $9.95-a-month subscription service that allows users to see one first-run movie per day in participating theaters anywhere in the U.S., and maybe my friend Patrick Ogle was to blame.
He had about as many good things to say about MoviePass as Alexander Hamilton had about Aaron Burr. In fact, he thought it might take a duel at dawn — with the help of some pointed Facebook messages and tweets — to finally put an end to his feud, too.
Like roughly 2 million other Americans, Ogle thought that signing up for MoviePass would be a good deal. After all, he goes to the movies roughly twice a week, so his near $120 investment could, in a world where the National Theater Owners Association estimates the average ticket price is $8.84 , save a bundle.
Besides, MoviePass made it all sound so easy. Sign up for the MoviePass card, which should arrive within a few days, download the app, activate the card, check in through the app at your chosen theater no more than an hour before showtime, select your film and then “purchase” your ticket with your card at the box office or kiosk. No muss, no fuss. But, in Ogle’s case, no movie.
“Pretty much right out of the gate, (the app) would stop working,” Ogle said. “And it didn’t happen once or twice, it happened repeatedly.”
Attempts to reach a human at MoviePass proved frustrating.
“The galling part is there was absolutely no customer service,” the Chicagoan said. “You can send messages on the app, and there’s never a response. You have a better chance getting hold of the pope … (Though) if I put something nasty on Twitter, they’d respond. They say, ‘Oh, we’ll take care of it’ and then they don’t.”
Finally, last month while trying to catch a movie while on vacation with his son in Florida, Ogle — who says the app worked about half the times he tried to use it — had had enough. He canceled it and hasn’t looked back. “I’m relieved not having it,” he said. Mo’ money, mo’ problems It was through Facebook that I became aware of Ogle’s mov- iegoing woes, as he wrote several posts dragging Moviepass to hell and back. And he’s hardly alone. He’s just one of many dissatisfied customers for the service that, by its own admission, has suffered growing pains since its founding in 2011 and major growth spurt in 2017, when it lowered its $30 price tag to $9.95 for an “unlimited” movie-a-day plan.
There have been long delays receiving a MoviePass card, confusion about what the card allows (customers couldn’t buy tickets to the Jennifer Lawrence film “Red Sparrow” in some markets), shifting plans (in April, MoviePass announced that new members could only see four movies a month but then a few days later went back to its unlimited model) and an entertainment-industry drumbeat pounding out the message that its business model, in which MoviePass pays theater owners full price for tickets, is unsustainable, possibly
leaving new customers with yet-to-be-used cards in the lurch when MoviePass inevitably collapses. (For its part, as Variety said last month, “MoviePass says it believes the data it collects on consumer behavior can eventually be monetized and is also selling ads to studios.”)
More recently, MoviePass announced that users couldn’t see the same movie twice and, in an apparent anti-scalping/anti-fraud move, launched a beta test in which some cardholders are ordered to upload photos of their ticket stubs. Failure to do so could lead to being kicked off the service. Predictably, the Twitterverse erupted.
It’s no shock then that Buzzfeed reported earlier this year that MoviePass, which is owned by the tech firm Helios and Matheson Analytics, “has been buried with complaints on social media.” There are at least three Reddit online communities, with a total of more than 26,000 members, devoted to the ups and downs of MoviePass.
In addition, there are competitors — like Sinemia — chipping away at market share and perhaps making MoviePass’ survival even more fraught.
Which is probably why an editor at the Chronicle suggested I give MovePass a go.
MoviePass 4 Life
Considering all these issues, I was a bit dubious about using the card myself. After all, who needs another technological hassle to deal with? Life’s too short to have trouble getting in to see “Rampage.”
But then I was encouraged by another friend whose MoviePass experience was the Bizarro World version of Patrick’s. Daniel Lumpkin and his fiancée, who live outside Atlanta, see roughly three movies a month and appreciate the money the card saves them. They are unabashed fans.
“(We) have this expression we used to say when watching trailers: ‘That’s a Redbox movie,’ ” he said. “We would say it when we were interested in seeing a film but …we considered the ‘Redbox movies’ a bit of a financial risk. Not worth spending $30-$40 on a movie that might break down halfway and be bad. Now, with MoviePass, there’s not really a financial risk.”
But he does have some hints for new users. “You have to check in on the app and you have to be pretty close (within 100 yards of the theater). And, if you’re using the app for the first time, it won’t notify you that you need to turn your location services or GPS services on for the app, so it won’t let you check in,” he said.
Also, he advises going to the box office instead of the kiosk — “I would imagine it gets way more complicated with the kiosk” — and, if you’re with someone who also has a MoviePass card, using two different ticket sellers, so no one mistakenly commits the ultimate MoviePass sin of swiping one card twice for the same movie. “A lot of people are getting their membership revoked for that,” he said.
Another issue is not every theater, even ones within the same chain, accept MoviePass. In Houston, for instance, the AMC Gulf Pointe 30 and AMC Studio 30 are listed on the app as MoviePass locations but the AMC Houston 8 downtown is not. The pricey, dine-in iPic in River Oaks doesn’t accept it either, while the Landmark River Oaks, not far away, does.
“We’re lucky because the theaters we like, take it,” Lumpkin said. “I would assume that places that don’t have too many theaters (that take it), that could get pretty frustrating.”
Expecting trouble
Armed with this information, I was anticipating hiccups with my MoviePass experiences in Houston and during a visit to Los Angeles. For sure, I thought I’d be making fast friends with their customer-service reps.
But it proved surprisingly easy. My card arrived a couple of weeks after applying and I tried it at different chains (AMC, Regal/Edwards, Alamo Drafthouse, the Laemmle arthouse theaters in California), at varying times of day, from matinee to late-night and at both the box-office and kiosk. (At Edwards Marq’E, an employee recommended using the box office over the kiosk, as there has been some customer confusion, but I found it pretty straightforward.)
Then I received the dreaded email that I had been chosen to be part of the test in which I now to have to upload a photo of my ticket stub in order to stay in the good graces of the MoviePass gods. It only adds a couple of extra minutes to the transaction — for me, it went smoothly though, from perusing Reddit, others haven’t been so lucky — but the more cumbersome the MoviePass process becomes, I’m less likely to think it’s worth it, no matter how much money I’m saving.
For me, MoviePass lives up to its marketing promise, though I still wonder how long it will be around. CNBC recently reported that the company is burning through $20 million a month and has $40 million on hand while share prices for owners Helios and Matheson’s stock have been plunging.
It’s probably a good idea to follow the sage advice of the old saying “smoke ’em if you got ’em” and use the card a lot — and quickly.
Despite others’ positive experiences, Ogle doesn’t think he could ever be lured back into the MoviePass fold. After he canceled, he discovered he had been charged twice.