MoviePass has changed people’s moviegoing habits
vox.com
vox.com
1/ MoviePass does not reimburse 100% of the ticket price to all theaters. In at least 1,000 theaters they are getting $3 back or 25% of concessions. This number will continue to increase as moviepass proves they can drive demand.
2/ HMNY literally specializes in packaging and selling data. I think it’s a mistake to treat them as if they don’t know what they’re doing.
3/ There are not a lot of options to deploy performance marketing dollars for movies. Instead, most of the spend goes towards broad-reach, hard to track, media. They can offer studios a way to spend marketing that is not only trackable, but measurably incremental. I cannot overstate how juicy that sounds to a person in charge of spending an $X0,00,000 marketing budget.
I feel confident they can get to $5-$10 per subscriber per month in revenue on the backend. If they can hit that, maintain solid churn numbers, and manage fraud, they will have a very healthy subscription business on their hands.
Also, while AMC is large, they aren’t the only game in town. They only control ~8k of the 40k screens in the US. You can bet that if moviepass is able to drive demand away from AMC they will cave eventually.
"Fast forward to today, in March and April, MoviePass paid AMC $12.02 per ticket on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tickets each month, hundreds of thousands of their subscribers came through AMC theaters to enjoy our product. They did so at a frequency of 2.62 times in March and 2.75 times in April. Now, I took the calculator out and I multiplied 2.75 times $12.02, and I got to a number that was considerably larger than 995. So just as we were hearing that -- the MoviePass price point was unsustainable in August, we have the same questions today. And apparently we’re not alone in that view. Our doubts are now shared and articulated by MoviePass's orders."
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4170917-amc-entertainment-h...
I haven't done much research into the numbers (only popped up on my radar a while ago) but the CEO said they have access to $300m worth of capital (i.e. debt) + the service would be profitable at 5m users. Burn was supposedly reduced by 30% since introducing that recent change. Which would give them approx. 15-20 months to execute their strategy in the best case.
On the off chance this one does work out, this will likely be a 100 bagger.
This company will likely go bankrupt. On the off chance it doesn't go bankrupt it will likely not increase in value 10,000%.
Movie theaters already have access to what movies people are seeing. They also have control over the ticket serving infrastructure. Moviepass literally exists because movie theaters don't want to waste their own money finding a profitable balance for subscriptions. So they'll let Moviepass burn 300 million validating the idea. Worst case scenario, it's a bad idea and movie theaters lose nothing, best case scenario its a good idea and they offer the service themselves.
This is 100% false in every conceivable way possible, in fact marketing something like a movie is probably the easiest example you walk through then you first start learning how to market.
HMNY will be diluted into the ground before then. Care to take me up on this bet?
This is pure gibberish to me, and I intend for that to always be the case.
https://www.wired.com/story/moviepass-second-act/
> It pays theaters full price for each ticket, whether a member visits once or 31 times a month.
Do you have a source for your claim that "In at least 1,000 theaters they are getting $3 back or 25% of concessions"?
I sat down with the head of marketing of a large cinema chain for something completely unrelated (bumped into the guy at an event) and they have corporate plans where tickets are significantly discounted (i.e. a normal ticket is €12,95 and corporates pay €3-5 if they buy 100s in bulk).
I guess the incentive is there, because they mostly make their profits from food / candy / nachos etc that are sold to people visiting the movie theatre.
Help me out here as I don't understand this one.
Basically when I go to a theater before the trailers I get ads. Then I get ads for nearly every movie ever..... that go on forever.
What else could they possibly do? Use that data to show me ads they're already showing me?
This makes the job of "design a movie that would appeal to X demographic" much easier
Advertisers like ads where they can see results more than just impression based ads.
Everyone points to data as manna from heaven, but other people need to find your data valuable. Who is going to buy moviepass data? Studios are drowning in data and still can't predict hits reliably. I'm generally an optimistic person and I don't see the silver lining here, I would be shocked if they could turn this ship around before going bankrupt.
That's $1000 a month in profit to 'play with'. If the average movie ticket is $10, that means they have 100 movie tickets of budget to spread among the remaining 40 users to break even. Divided out, that means each user can only see 2.5 movies a month before Moviepass starts losing money.
There are a couple takeaways from this (admittedly simplistic) analysis:
1. Moviepass seems to need a very high percentage of user not use the service in order to have any chance of profitability. There's just too much 'downside risk' from heavy users otherwise. That's a bit of a 'product smell' to me; you generally want o have usage of your product to have some positive correlation to your profitability. 2. Even if they strike deals with the theater chains, they're going to need to negotiate fairly steep discounts. Even if Moviepass only has to pay $5 per movie, that still only lets users see 3 movies a month, which is less than one a week. Are theaters inclined to reduce the price of a ticket to $0? It might work then, but I don't see why theaters would torpedo their average selling price (ASP). 3. Wrt performance marketing, moviepass better be selling ads to mesothelioma lawyers (~$300 cpc). I can't think of any organization that would pay enough to offset the potentially massive loss per customer.
Moviepass screams of selling $10 bills for $5. That in itself isn't necessarily bad, but to me it doesn't look like they have a way to bootstrap themselves out of this model.
I know the company will probably fold sooner or later, but I surely will miss it when it happens, and sincerely hope that the subscription model can live on.
If I had to bet, MoviePass is the reason my Regal Points expire now.
It is the worst run company I have ever worked for.
For example when "Something About Mary" came out we put it in theater 5. 150 seats. It was selling out every show. I was the projectionist at the time and said we should put it in #3 which had 534 seats. The box office was turning away hundreds of people every few hours.
I do not care about company profits. But I do care about my friends working concessions and door and usher. If we had the movie in the right theater we could have used more workers.
But lazy managers kept the print in #5 for weeks. Since it was a pain to swap prints in the computers. It wasn't.. It took two minutes.
That is just one example of many. It got even worse when I had to contact Nashville everyday to get basic supplies. It is never fun explaining why you need a new oscilloscope to a person that doesn't know what one is.
1. I'll see by myself 2. I'll see if someone else wants to. 3. Nope
With MoviePass, my friend group and I have been able to to add a 4th option to that list: I'll see it if it looks interesting enough and I have nothing better to do.
When I saw the movie Gringo, I got an email from Moviepass asking "Would you have seen this movie without MoviePass?"
I'd change the title too and drop "moviegoing habits" to simply "habits". I'm probably out on average 2 nights more a week than I used to be. I'll stop on the way home from standing appointments to grab dinner and a movie, just to wait out traffic. I don't think I'd ever done this before in my life.
If I owned a restaurant near a theater, I'd figure out how to be a Moviepass affiliate, in a heartbeat. Assuming they can survive, of course.
Something like Netflix or Spotify is harder to fully quantify.
If that happens, how is a second business going to overcome MoviePass (who would then have the additional revenue streams)?
If it's a risky play to do first, then it's even riskier to do second.
I bet they’re waiting for MoviePass to go belly up first. No point in having to compete with a company that’s literally throwing money at them (paying full price x3-4 per person per month to AMC).
None of them are halfway as good of a deal as moviepass is.
Watching the ad for it preroll every time before a movie I've 'paid for' (with MoviePass) coming on has become a running joke between me and my partner that only people who are such luddites that they've never heard of MoviePass would remotely think it was a good deal.
https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/media-and-enterta...