Netflix Co-Founder's Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want (bloomberg.com)

Mitch Lowe, a founder of Netflix, has a crazy idea. Through his new startup MoviePass, he wants to subsidize our film habit, letting us go to the theater once a day for about the price of a single ticket. From a report: Lowe, an early Netflix executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company's movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens. MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people's movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics, a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. [...] Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment, lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer.

Comments

How much do I pay...

[mapkinase]

... to kick out all teenagers and people with small kids?

Doesn't seem realistic

[Jeff DeMaagd]

They're hoping to collect marketing data. I am skeptical that the marketing data is worth that but even so it strikes me as a bad deal for everyone.

Which theaters participate?

[Jfetjunky]

Their website calls it a "Theater Network", which immediately conjures up the idea that it doesn't work everywhere. But there's no way to see in advance (that I could find) which theaters participate in their service. The FAQ has this specific question listed, but it just tells you to go back to the main website, where there is no apparent way to find this info without signing up for the service.

Yeah, you get a 1-month trial just like Netflix did/does, but I'd still like to see in advance if it's even worth pursuing.

Re:Ten years too late?

[Zak3056]

We have a drive in outside of Knoxville, and it's fantastic. If you don't want to sit in the car, then park facing backward and sit in the bed of your pickup, or bring those canvas fold-up chairs to sit in. Bring whatever snacks you want to from the outside world, or use the theater's snack bar, where a diner style cheeseburger costs $4.00 rather than spending $8.00 for popcorn at the regular theater that tells you you can't even bring your backpack in because you might have a bottle of water of some candy in it. See two movies (one of which is often a new release... I remember they had Avengers on opening day) for $7.00 a head.

Best movie experience I've had in decades.

Re:Nah. Fuck the cinema

[thomst]

bazmail sneered:

Am I right?

For me? Yes, you are. But only because the movie-going experience so thoroughly and comprehensively sucks, here in the 21st century version of America.

Back when I was young, and we rode our pet dinosaurs to school (uphill both ways), going to the movies was a compleely immersive experience. No, we didn't have sooper-dooper Dullby sound systems, or especially convincing special effects, and the seats weren't nearly as comfortable as they are these days. But what we did have was a culture of respect for the experience. People might talk during the "Let's all go to the lobby!" concessions promo, but the absolute picosecond the newsreel started (yes, I'm that old), everyone in the theater shut all the fucking way up, and we all merged into that singular, collective creature: an audience.

There weren't any cell phones in those days, so, if you wanted to make a phone call, you had to go to the lobby to do it. There were theater employees called "ushers" (and usherettes), who would stand at the back of the auditorium (there was only one per theater back then - and, blelieve it or not, it usually had a balcony section to increase its capacity still further). Their job was to escort lobby-blinded patrons back to their seats, and to be on the lookout for "hijinks" and that most despised of all sub-human species, "talkers".

Talkers got ONE warning. That was it. Open your yap again, and you would be politely escorted out of the building. Get escorted out of the building too many times, and you would be banned from re-entering. Forever. And if you tried to pick a fight with an usher, well, there were plenty of aspiring knights-errant who were willing to lend him/her a hand in escorting you out of the building, only minus the "politely" part.

And that - plus the sheer size of the audience - made the experience an entirely different one that what modern movie-goers are subjected to. Everyone (except those hijinks-prone kids) was there to watch the movie. Not make and recieve a half-dozen phone calls, check their Facebook feed, chat with their posse, or carry on a shouted conversation with/exhortation to the characters on the screen. The screen was huge, the house was usually full, and the experience of seeing a movie with a room full of strangers, all raptly attentive, was satisfying in a way that watching the same movie in a theater today simply can't be. It wasn't a matter of degree. It was a matter of kind - an experience of a kind that simply no longer exists in the 21st century.

At least, not here, in the land of the free and the home of the entitled nitwit it doesn't. In other countries, YMMV - and it probably does. But in the USA, we've fully embraced out inner oaf, and the theater owners sit with folded hands and let their patrons progressively degrade the movie-going experience to the point where I, personally, would not go to the theater if you paid me to do so, because I just don't need the aggravation.

So, instead, I sit in my living room, with my 7.1 sound system, and watch (mostly pirated) movies on my modest, 40-inch flat screen. And, although I really miss the movie-going experience I remember so fondly from my youth (Just as a for-instance, I was lucky enough to live in Honolulu when 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered - it was one of only 6 cities in the USA which enjoyed the distinction of an exclusive, 6-week engagement - at the Cinerama Theater on King Street, downtown. It was a reserved-seat performance, and I was lucky enough to get a center seat, albeit in the third row, which turned out to be just a little bit closer to the screen than would have been optimal. When the lights went down and the curtain opened up, a hush fell over the audience. Which, y'know, was pretty normal for then. What was very different was that there was no concessions pitch, no newsreel, no previews of coming attractions. Instead, when the screen lit up, we were in