Is moviepass able to restrict who charges to the card? When I read about how their preloaded charge card system works, it made me wonder if someone with a square reader could just create a business with the word theaters in their name and charge the value of the ticket while in the theater lobby.
To get the funds loaded on the prepaid debit card you must check in to the movie on your phone, with GPS turned on, and within 100 feet of the theater, and purchase the ticket within 30 minutes of check-in.
And you're restricted from using one account on multiple phones.
Thats why they're requiring ticket stub photos now. I imagine they also have some auditing tricks to find people using the card at non approved locations based on transaction history.
Perhaps MoviePass can make a case to studios or theater chains directly that giving a break to their higher-volume customers might help drive more business overall...
That was definitely their plan, (1) burn cash to get enough customers (2) use leverage of large customer base to get deal for lower cost tickets from theaters (3) finally make a profit. A problem is that to really leverage their customers for step (2) they'd have to believably threaten to block their subscribers from using that theater which will also cause some people to leave. In the mean time theaters would only decrease their take by giving them the deal. Not terribly surprised the theaters aren't enthusiastic about the whole company.
They are making that case now. If they can get discount ticket prices and stop people from abusing the service (like the guy in a post here whose friend buys and gives away tickets) then they might be able to break even.
The “one movie a day” thing becomes moot though after this change. Since there will really be no more than 3-5 new movies a month anyways (outside of big cities at least where you might get indie and foreign films).
Theaters can cut them in because movie pass puts butts in seats. And theaters make the vast majority of their income from concessions and not ticket sales. Most of the ticket revenue goes back to the studios.
Right, but how much money do you think it costs to add a MoviePass-like feature to their ticketing system and their phone apps, compared to paying MoviePass a cut? If it really is a revenue-driving system, they can just implement it themselves. Or if they want to do it cross-chain, I bet you Fandango could implement such a functionality pretty easily. The part about developing a service like this that costs money is eating the loss on tickets, not the software engineering. MoviePass isn't a value add to this process. It's like Groupon, which quickly established a market but they had no "stickiness" for consumers and they've been swirling the drain ever since.
I imagine theaters are reticent to turn encourage people to get on a service that is essentially putting themselves between them and their customers.
If they give discounts and support moviepass, then moviepass could eventually wield enough power to force discounts on theaters or else the theater will get blacklisted.
Frequent movie viewers talk to, or attend with friends who might not have otherwise gone? You would want to collect attendance data in comparable areas w/ and w/o and have varying degrees of Movie Pass users to validate the effect.
