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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

This was inevitable. Moviepass was the dumbest startup idea I’ve ever seen.

Well they don't put anyone's lives at risk so surely that gets them out of say, the bottom 5%?

Not really.

If they had stuck with trying to move people into just cheap tickets up front, nobody would have complained and they might have been able to reach critical mass. The problem is that the VC's wanted to cash out in 18 months or go broke--well they're getting what they wanted.

Movie theatres have a lot of unsold inventory on off times. They probably would have been willing to cut all manner of deals for those times.

However, they were never going to give you chunks of primetime unless you had a huge cudgel.

One of the big problems now they’re making it near impossible to see movies during the cheap times. You’d think they’d incentivize people to go to the Tuesday cheap ticket shows.

The idea is fine. The execution was garbage. They created a race to the bottom that no one felt compelled to join.

The race to the bottom seemed to be an attempt to capture a userbase which could then be directed at particular films whose publishers paid MoviePass or used directly as a cudgel in negotiating better pricing from theaters. Might have worked eventually if they had been able to keep bleeding money.

As a consumer, I think I got a much better deal out of AMC crushing this particular middle-man before things got out of control.

Once MoviePass folds, what would be AMC's incentive to keep A-List going?

AMC gets concession revenues. It may well be that losing money on tickets is made up for by increased sales of popcorn, drinks, candy, etc.

They still want to pull in more people that may buy high margin concessions. Their per user costs are pretty low they can cut the price per ticket down to pretty much the amount they have to pay the studio.

It was the clearest example of a start-up designed to build marketshare without any idea how to profit from that marketshare.

Anybody can create a business trading $5 for $6 dollars and get millions of subscribers but that doesn't make that business idea good.

They had a plan but it backfired when the theaters refused to give them a cut of concessions. Also backfired when their funded movie flopped.

They thought they could use their millions of customers as leverage against the theaters but that was a ridiculous plan.

My understanding is that their entire idea is the race to the bottom. What's the fine idea I'm missing?

They started the subscription service at $50 per month which was sustainable. It only started going downhill when they reduced the price to $10 per month. They had to reduce the selection of movies you can watch. Cutting 80% of the price obviously means cutting at least 80% of the service.

The idea is a feature, not a standalone product.

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