> Building market share by massive "deficit spending" is how many companies became huge in the past decades.
Sure, but that's got limits. If you need to sell a product for less than COGS when you start a company, no worries, but you need a plan to flip that ratio around eventually before investors get fed up and stop handing you capital. Maybe when you scale up to mass-production, your production cost per unit drops. Or you steadily creep the price up over time, or push features into a higher paying tier. Or maybe the product is a loss leader, and you make the money up elsewhere (eg: sell hardware at a loss, recoup it in subscriptions).
The point is MoviePass did not appear to ever have a hope of succeeding other than "maybe in the future, we can negotiate enough deals with cinemas to drive the cost down." They had other levers that I'm sure they were considering too: limit MoviePass to empty seats/certain showings on quiet nights, increase the price of MoviePass, limit the number of views per month, etc. The trouble is, they sold MoviePass at such a ridiculously low price point ($10/mo) that even if they did all of those things, there's no guarantee they would have been able to boil the frog slowly enough to reach profitability.
As the article points out, MoviePass was cheaper than buying just one ticket when it first launched. Somebody who only saw two movies per month already cost the company more than double what they brought in, and there were plenty of people using it weekly. You're creating a huge customer expectation with that - it's going to be a very tough sell to trim that offering to the point where it's profitable and you retain enough customers at the end of the day.