Former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe Reflects on Company’s Spectacular Rise and Fall: ‘It Truly Was Embarrassing and Hurtful’
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor By slashing prices, Mitch Lowe transformed MoviePass into a supernova. The ticketing service, which had ambitions to become the Netflix of moviegoing, had languished for years until Lowe took the reins in 2017 as Helios and Matheson, an analytics firm, purchased a controlling stake.
At the same time, Lowe announced that for a monthly fee of $9.95, users could now watch a movie-a-day in cinemas — less than the cost of a single ticket in major cities like New York and Los Angeles.
It was an offer that was too good to refuse, pushing MoviePass to 2 million customers in roughly six months. But it was also a risky proposition, one that caused the company to burn through tens of millions of dollars and collapse in spectacular fashion just two years later. “It truly was embarrassing and hurtful,” says Lowe. “I tried as hard as I could, but I should have tried harder.
I should have been more thoughtful, and I should have been more strategic. But I’ve got to live with that.” Now, Lowe is making sense of that wild ride and his stints as a top executive at MoviePass and Redbox in a new memoir, “Watch and Learn: How I Turned Hollywood Upside Down with Netflix, Redbox, and Moviepass,” which went on sale on Sept.
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