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.
