You actually can. It's the oldest trick of the industrial age, mass production and economies of scale. A good rule of thumb is that increasing production of a physical good by a factor of 10 will drop the unit cost by half. For non-tangible goods the effect is even more pronounced. The fist copy of Microsoft Windows might cost 1 billion dollars to produce, while every next copy is essentially free.
What this new breed of money loosing company signifies is a shift of business models to the software-eat-world paradigm: high upfront capital investment, zero marginal cost, exceptionally strong consumer lock-in (thus profits) once you break through and dominate the market. There is nothing fundamentally different between Amazon Prime and MoviePass, they are both loss leaders designed to increase foothold in the market, with a view to later use that dominance to dictate the rules. One was built on good economics and well executed, the other is not and will fail, but it's essentially the same business move.
> The fist copy of Microsoft Windows might cost 1 billion dollars to produce, while every next copy is essentially free
You'd have to split R&D costs by the units sold here. If you spend 1B and sell 1000 copies a price of 100$ per copy won't help you.
Then you have the secondary effects of lock in (with software/services) that makes every sale also reduce the cost of a future sale or economies of scale (physical goods) that again make volume more desirable.
This doesn't contradict the adage about having to sell at a per unit profit, but it complicates figuring out what number that is and can lead to some non-intuitive results, which does trash the value of the adage as a simple way of looking at things.
Not saying every company that is selling at a loss to get customers in hopes that they'll mysteriously figure out how to later profit is doing so correctly, but some are. Oversimplification adds little value to these problems.
MoviePass sells subscriptions and then buys tickets. For each extra subscriber they've got an increase in marginal cost. You might argue they can make a profit by charging more for the subscription than they pay for the tickets, but there's lots of factors working against that:
1. When they IPO their suppliers will know their revenue and can demand high prices to match, seriously threatening their marginal cost.
2. Their suppliers already have scale and so will be difficult to leverage - further hitting marginal cost.
3. Their suppliers are extremely capable of producing a competing product undercutting them- destroying the lock-in component. The suppliers control access to the content not MoviePass.
Amazon stopped making /losses/ rather quickly. They /invested/ in the health of their business and future opportunities instead of delivering profits to outside investors.
Arguably, a better structure for incorporation does exactly that; it provides benefits to it's employees and the community it serves.