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MoviePass Limiting Subscribers To 3 Movies Per Month (npr.org)
nolaguy shares a report from NPR: Movie theater subscription service MoviePass will not be raising prices, as it had announced last week, but will instead be capping the number of times that subscribers can visit movie theaters. For $9.95 per month, MoviePass subscribers used to be able to see a movie in theaters every day, if they so chose. Beginning on August 15, the service will instead provide three movies per month. The change replaces a previously announced plan to raise prices to $14.95 a month. The beleaguered movie theater subscription company is also canceling two other recent changes -- "peak pricing" surcharges for popular movies and a ticket verification process -- that were intended to stop the company from bleeding money.
They're still 10's of millions of dollars in the hole, just to get to even, much less profitable.
They say that the problem was people that 'abused' the system, meaning people that took them up on the original offer as stated. Even at three movies a month, they're still buying tickets at full price and selling them for less. So yeah, I think they'd need about 90% of their subscribers to pay them each month and choose not to see any movies. Good luck with that.
This story goes way deeper. The parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, is a spin-off of Helios and Matheson Information Technology, an Indian ponzi scheme that defrauded between five and seven thousand investors, including the elderly and banks. The Indian principals' accounts in India are still frozen and the fraud investigation is still pending. Some of them were involved in the US H&M board or got hired as "consultants" to the US board for over $18K/month.
https://www.businessinsider.com/moviepass-has-deep-ties-to-indian-company-accused-of-fraud-2018-6
The newer US board and C-levels are serial penny-stock entrepreneurs in fields like psychic phone networks and marijuana vending machines.
The whole thing was always a blend of ponzi and pump and dump. They use hype to lure in investors, and they were wildly successful, running the stock up to 8000 less than a year ago and crashing it to less than a dollar.
Everyone who ever touched either Helios and Matheson needs to be investigated and held as a flight risk, especially the Indians who already fled India. This company needs to be prosecuted as an example and deterrent.