The Return Of MoviePass
Movie Pass is back, and its pitch is the same. Is the world of movies it returns to any different?
Originally founded in 2011, and finding a huge membership in late 2017, MoviePass was a subscription service with a simple premise: pay a flat monthly rate, and get access to almost any movie at almost any theater once a day. In late 2019, the service was shut down, and a few months later the parent company filed for bankruptcy. Strangely enough, the movie theater business would be put on pause entirely just five weeks afterwards.
Three years later, the service is back. Original co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was fired shortly after the service was acquired in 2017, was given back the rights to the company in late 2021, and a year later, had the service back and running again. I was a user in its original run, using it sparingly, and I am a user again in its new iteration. I have seen one movie with it (M. Night Shayamalan’s KNOCK AT THE CABIN).
Technically, Movie Pass didn’t miss much air time with its shuddering and reacquisition coming just before and just after theaters have returned to profitability (sort of). But within that window of inoperation, Hollywood and theater-going, and consumerism and human life, have all been nudged off their beaten paths. What was the movie world like when MoviePass was still with us? What is the movie world like now as it returns to our virtual wallets?
Back in 2017, when the service was bought-out and membership was thriving, the movie-going world looked much like it did for all of the 2010’s: packed with adaptations, sequels, and comic book movies. The ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ was nearing completion of its ten-year story arc, and fans were eating it up. Those movies felt like important cultural touchstones, at least business-wise and water-cooler-wise. Over 1.2 billion movie tickets were sold that year, a slight dip from the previous two years, but not out of line with how the business had been doing, or would do in the next couple of pre-pandemic years.
The highest grossing movies, domestically, were the Star Wars movie, a Disney live-action remake, a comic book movie, a fantasy sequel, a comic book sequel, a comic book sequel, a Steven king adaptation, a comic book sequel, a comic book sequel, and a comic book team-up movie. This, of course, was par for the course, and the list from any calendar year since IRON MAN (2008) was made will look similar.
Beyond the box office, some truly great stuff was being made and recognized, too. 2017 was one of my favorite movie years of my lifetime. GET OUT, LADYBIRD, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, THE FLORIDA PROJECT, PHANTOM THREAD, GOOD TIME, PADDINGTON 2, FIRST REFORMED, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, HAPPY DEATH DAY, LOGAN LUCKY, COLUMBUS, and many others were released. That’s a good year! I was living at the theater.
I would call this year a launch of a new era of young modern filmmakers: Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, Sean Baker, the Safdie brothers, the breakout of Barry Jenkins and the big hit from Damien Chazelle the previous winter. And there was also, from my perspective now, huge hits with the burgeoning new generation of filmgoers, lovingly referred to by me as Zoomers (Generation Z) in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LADYBIRD. Those movies are, still, young people’s entire personalities.
The next two years, MoviePass’s last, were mostly similar — box office numbers, box office winners, and great art on the margins — before the pandemic started. What happened in the business between the months of March 2020 and March 2022 is something someone could, and will, write a book about, which I will not be doing, so I’ll leave that time to another. But in late May, something, nay, someone, saved cinema.
Ok, let’s back-up a little bit. In mid-2018, during MoviePass’ heyday, AMC theaters launched a competing subscription for about $20 — double the price of MoviePass — to see up to three movies a week; Cinemark theaters have a $10/month program for one movie-ticket; and Regal theaters have a $19 see-as-much-as-you-want membership. All of these came in the heat of those couple of years of booming comic book cinema and a doomed-to-fail outside competitor in MoviePass.
Now, just as Tom Cruise drags dads and others moviegoers back into theaters, MoviePass returns, with three plans of their own:
$10 for 1-3 movies a month.
$20 for 3-7
$30 for 5-11
$40 for 30
Not the breakneck cost of its original iteration (under $10 one movie a day), and it now uses variable pricing — hence the range one possible movies per month — but this service lets you go to nearly any theater, something the theater-specific programs cannot offer.
(Note: AMC is also now introducing Sightline, a program that will charge variable prices depending on how good your seat is in the theater, or something. Maybe this makes tickets — some of them — cheaper, but it also might make tickets — some of them — more expensive? I truly don’t know, or really care currently)
So we are flush with options to get to the movies a bunch at a reduced rate. Which matters, because movies are as expensive as they have ever been. The pandemic was the first year in, I don’t know, ever?? that did not see ticket prices increase. Instead, they just stayed the same. But speaking personally, the $10 MoviePass subscription, which I am subscribed to, is cheaper than a single ticket at my local Regal theater. If I see one movie a month, I would be saving money.
Something that did increase after the start of the pandemic is ticket sales:
People are coming back, and that’s mostly because movies are coming back. TOP GUN: MAVERICK was finally released, after being delayed through the and many other movies also finally saw the light of day. And that brings us to now, almost-spring of 2023.
The bottle-necking of release dates and keeping good movies in the dark is colliding with the finishing of big pandemic-era projects to create a broad, deep, exciting schedule of movie releases in the next several months. To speak on a few:
Tom Cruise is back in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (movie title of the year??) and he’s still literally trying to kill himself via visually vivacious physical stunts. He’ll see you at the movies.
Christopher Nolan, after breaking-up with Warner Brothers after they wouldn’t release TENET in theaters in the middle of a deadly pandemic (weird flex, but ok), is back with a new historical epic about a sad guy who makes “the bomb” in OPPENHEIMER.
Greta Gerwig follows up her masterpiece adaptation of a beloved female property with the adaptation of another: BARBIE.
Outside of many big-name releases, the state of movies that are in theaters is not un-exciting. There is a plethora of schlock that is genuinely interested in having fun or provocation or both. M. Night Shayamalan is smanging a movie out every year, and this year’s KNOCK AT THE CABIN is a debate-worthy piece of modern storytelling; M3GAN and COCAINE BEAR are ideas that sound like they were pitched by someone on, well, cocaine, and both movies drew big crowds; the SCREAM franchise has been reinvigorated and youth-enized, 20- and 30- something filmmakers are making and releasing passion projects; old masters are making and releasing passion projects. The grass seems to be a little greener.
Additionally, the behemoth and killer of fine art of pre-pandemic cinema, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has maybe never had less juice than it does now. The failed and now-remade MCU-copycat at Warner Brothers, the DC comics universe, or whatever, is stumbling over its own shoelaces as it tries to ramp up to relevance. I think the nature of commercial storytelling might be on the brink of, not a revolution, but at least being something different. And I like different.
Movies are back. They mostly never left. And movie-goers are coming back. You may have noticed I didn’t mention streaming once. That certainly has had, and will forever continue to have, an impact. Will ticket sales ever be what they once were? Literally no one could know that. Maybe having theaters taken from us will have made us miss them, and want them back. Maybe being forced into the comfort of our homes will have made us like staying at home, with our pandemic-purchased home theater upgrades. To each their own.
But MoviePass, and the theater chains themselves, are trying to get us back, and trying to help us afford to get there. Independent cinemas, another topic I have not covered here, also need our help to survive (MoviePass, at least here in Portland, does get you tickets to some independent theaters). And the movies themselves sound promising, at least in theory.
The world is changing — back towards how it used to be, and simultaneously to a new, different version of what was going to be — and it will always be changing. Movies — and books and poetry and paintings and music, and all art — are reflections of those changes, or escapes from them. I won’t debate that the theater gives you a better experience. It does. But can MoviePass, or anyone, convince you to go more frequently, or at all? They’re betting, for a second time, that they can.
How did all of your Portlanders spend SNOWMAGEDDON 2023? What did you watch? What soups did you make? Does drizzling olive oil in them actually make a difference? What book did you snuggle up with?
Happy to be publishing again. See you tomorrow with a round-up of things.
TTFN
B