Katcy Stephan Back in 2017, a little red debit card was the hottest ticket in town — for film buffs and investors alike. One swipe of a MoviePass membership card gave access to daily movie tickets at a staggeringly low monthly subscription rate of $9.95.
And the concept promised to redefine the future of the moviegoing business. Subscriptions exploded, the company’s stock soared and investors rushed to get in on the venture.
But the deal was, as skeptics suspected, too good to be true: MoviePass lost $150 million in 2017, and ultimately shuttered in 2019.
It’s tempting to chalk up the failure to an unsustainable business model. Yet the new HBO documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” which premieres May 29, aims to paint a clearer picture of just what went wrong. “There’s a story under the story,” Stacy Spikes, who co-founded MoviePass with Hamet Watt in 2011, tells Variety.
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