Pass! 5 Reasons MoviePass Sounded Like A Terrible Idea To Us
If you’re not familiar with it, MoviePass was a service that was designed to allow you to see any movie you wanted to see in theaters as many times as you wanted to see it—for $50 a month. The thought behind it was that MoviePass would encourage more people to go out and see movies that they might not otherwise see and create another stream of income for the big Hollywood studios.
However, MoviePass essentially died on Thursday just hours before the company was set to hold a test run in San Francisco over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Apparently, two major theater chains—AMC and Landmark—denied knowing anything about it and said that they would not honor MoviePass tickets at any of their theaters. As a result, MoviePass cancelled the rest run and has gone on a “temporary hiatus.”
To be honest, we can’t really say that we’re all that upset about it. We see what MoviePass was trying to do for us, but we get the sneaky suspicion that MoviePass wouldn’t have been worth the price of admission in the long run. With that in mind, we sat down and came up with a list of five reasons MoviePass sounded like a terrible idea to us from the start. Here’s why we would have passed on MoviePass.
1. 50 dollars is a lot of money to spend on movies.
If you see six or more movies a month at roughly 10 bucks a pop, it would make sense for you to buy a MoviePass. But the majority of people who enjoy going to the movies do so when movies that they want to see come out. Some months, that might mean they see eight movies. Other months, it might only mean two or three movies. So for the majority of people who enjoy going to the movies, it wouldn’t be worth buying a MoviePass. They’d actually probably end up losing money in the long run.
2. MoviePass shines a light on just how expensive movies are today.
We absolutely hate the fact that we have to fork over 10 bucks (or more!) to see a movie today. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that we’ve stop seeing as many movies as we used to. And if we really need to spend 50 bucks a month to save money at the movie theater, it’s probably time for us to start budgeting our money a little bit better.
3. Most months, there really aren’t six movies out there that we want to see.
We get it. By paying 50 bucks, we can see any movie we want, as many times as we want. Which means we can see flicks that we might not normally want to see in theaters just because we can. However, isn’t that the problem? Some months, there isn’t one good movie out that we want to see, let alone six or seven that’d warrant a MoviePass subscription.
4. MoviePass wouldn’t necessarily have to be honored at all theaters.
Let’s say AMC eventually caved and started accepting MoviePass, but another theater chain refused to do the same. Does that mean we would have to see all of our movies at the same chain? That presents a bit of a problem as we’re restricted in what we can see and when we can see it in that case. It sounds like there’s a lot of red tape that would need to be cut to make this whole operation work, and we’re not sure we have the time or patience to sit around while MoviePass tries to do it.
5. We don’t want to encourage Hollywood to make anymore crappy movies.
Tinsel Town already puts together enough subpar films without knowing that they’ve already got our 50 bucks in their pocket. Can you imagine what they’d try to pass off as acceptable movies if they knew they had X amount of customers signed up to a subscription that requires them to pay $50 a month to see movies? We need to make Hollywood work to get our hard-earned money, not just give it to them and assume that they’re going to produce quality flicks. With all of the superhero movies and sequels popping up right now (Thor 2? Really?) Hollywood’s already acting lazy enough. So why should we give them a pass for doing it by paying for MoviePass? It’s just one of the many reasons that, on paper, it’s a great idea. But as of right now, we still hate it.











