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Goodnight, Sweet Prince: MoviePass Finally Dies



MoviePass, the business by Helios and Matheson that would be our film savior after slashing its initial price from nearly 50$ for Unlimited Movies to a mere 9.99$.

Alas, the dream has died.

The change drew a flood of new customers - and left competitors scrambling for ways to implement their own movie subscription service. As of this writing, AMC Stubs is a runaway success, and Regal Unlimited is still in its infancy.

I have neither, as both plans arrived after our theaters were shuttered from Hurricane Michael. The AMC will not reopen, with no word on the Regal.

The app, from secondhand reports, seemed glitchy, with poor location-realizing services. Despite this, Studio Movie Grill did team up with the service to implement food ordering from the app.

Less than a month ago, MoviePass had a data breach of unencrypted customer card numbers. Even though the card was essentially a prepaid one you could only buy tickets with at theaters, that's never good protocol.

They didn't die because they had a data breach - Multiple large business expose us every day that are still ticking - but because they simply ran out of money.

With the influx of new customers,  Helios and Matheson had to pay out for each ticket. At 9.99$ a month, they were banking on people using the service once or twice a month - and were losing a lot of money.

They did change requirements, from 'All times, all 2D movies', to certain movies during certain times - A futile effort.

In the end, they simply could not raise the funds. You have until September 14th, 2019 to get one last movie in - if you can.


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