Discount movie ticket subscription service MoviePass will officially cease operations on September 14, finally laying to rest the service that has been slowly deteriorating over the past several years.
Today, Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns Moviepass, announced that its board of directors has decided to interrupt service for all subscribers while it determines what to do with the company.
In order to make that determination it has created a strategic review committee comprised of the company’s independent directors to “identify, review, and explore all strategic and financial alternatives for the Company, including a sale of the Company in its entirety, a sale of substantially all of the Company’s assets including MoviePass, Moviefone, and MoviePass Films, a business reorganization or one or more other extraordinary corporate transactions, together with the assumption or settlement of the Company’s liabilities in connection with any of these alternatives.”
MoviePass initially began operations in 2011 in San Francisco and has had a tumultuous life from its inception.
In 2011 the service allowed customers to see one movie per day for a set fee. When theaters started to refuse MoviePass customers, it pivoted to instead have users print a voucher at home for entrance to the movie. In 2012, it launched a national beta of the service, providing a debit card for customers to use to buy tickets, but that too was met with resistance from movie theaters.
The service has changed hands and shifted sales strategies a number of times over the years. In July of this year, it once again suspended service for subscribers, a move that it made in the middle of the July 4 holiday weekend. Last month, TechCrunch also reported that tens of thousands of MoviePass customer’s credit card numbers were exposed in a leak.
MoviePass may be dead, but that doesn’t mean movie subscription services are gone. Regal Cinemas launched its own version of MoviePass in July, which it called Regal Unlimited. The plan offers different pricing tiers ranging from $18 to $24 for a monthly subscription to movies shown at Regal theaters.
We’ve reached out to MoviePass for a comment on the company’s announcement and will update this story if and when we receive a response.
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