MoviePass will give it another shot with summer relaunch, but details are still scarce
Hollywood loves a reboot — is it ready for MoviePass 2.0?
The too-good-to-be-true subscription service that once allowed film fans to see a movie a day in theaters for a fee as low as $9.95 a month is preparing to relaunch this summer.
Stacy Spikes — the former film exec and producer who helped launch MoviePass in 2011, was ousted from the company in 2018, and bought it back out of bankruptcy last November — announced the news Thursday in a presentation that was livestreamed from Lincoln Center in New York.
Details are still scarce, including how much the new MoviePass will cost, but Spikes said it would feature tiered pricing plans and a credit system that will roll over each month. Users will be able to trade and share credits, and potentially earn more by, say, watching targeted advertisements (with dystopian-sounding eye-tracking tech to make sure folks are paying attention).
Dressed in a Steve Jobs-ian black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers, Spikes addressed the meteoric rise and catastrophic implosion of the previous incarnation of MoviePass. "A lot of people lost money," he said. "A lot of people lost trust. There were a lot of people who were hurt and disappointed, and I was one of those people who was disappointed and hurt too."
The new version of the company, he said, will strive "to build the first end-to-end cinematic marketplace. So what does that mean? Right now there's something built for studios, and there's something built for theaters. But there's nothing built for us, that we actually are the center of. We want to be able to help software solve that problem and be able to bring us all together more efficiently. And we want to build that with Web3 technologies. And that's our vision of the future."
Time will tell whether MoviePass can realize that vision. Watch Spikes' presentation above.
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