MoviePass Ends AMC Standoff, Joins Forces with Moviefone
MoviePass is one of those companies whose assets and offers perpetually seem too good to be true. It seemingly spends an excess of money continuously, offering cheaper and cheaper deals to subscribers while still paying full price for its services. AMC Theaters was the first (and, so far, only) major chain to dispute MoviePass’s value, which led MoviePass to retaliate by cutting off 10 AMC locations from its app in major cities across the country. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, it seems the two companies have come to an agreement, as MoviePass has ended their standoff with the theater chain and reopened its services to those excluded theaters.
In March, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron said that MoviePass’s model, whatever it is, is “unsustainable,” and that its numbers don’t add up, which is what caused the ticketing service to fire back in the first place. More than likely, MoviePass is playing some long con, spending buckets of money at the outset in the hopes that it can make it all back with interest at some later date. The company has recently started making deals with distribution companies for advertising for certain films and has acquired a few films of its own, branding itself as a moviemaking company as well as a ticketing one. It recently expanded its services to Mark Cuban’s Landmark Theaters and as of Thursday, has bought online movie showtime database Moviefone from its parent company, Verizon’s digital division Oath.
The Wall Street Journal reports Moviefone “will serve as a platform to recruit new MoviePass subscribers and to expand its advertising business” with the site’s roughly 6 million unique monthly visitors, a model that MoviePass is swiftly utilizing to make back some of that money it’s spending buying people’s tickets at full price. MoviePass says only 12 percent of its subscribers are “heavy users” that go see multiple movies a month essentially for free, and it is profiting a little off the remaining 88 percent who only go see one movie a month, or none at all. Most of them don’t live in major cities like New York or Los Angeles, where a movie ticket at a major theater chain costs around $17 and using MoviePass just once a month already saves you money.
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