Instead of trying to attract subscribers, the company's main concern is limiting how much people can actually use it, lest it go broke. But, really, the writing has been on the wall since MoviePass announced its $9.95-a-month plan. That's only slightly more than the $8.97 average ticket price across the US, and in metropolitan areas like New York City, that figure is upwards of $16. While the plan was an incredible deal for consumers, it led to MoviePass's bleeding money at the altar of Silicon Valley's most capricious god: growth hacking -- in layman's terms, experimenting with different marketing and pricing models with the hopes of making your user numbers explode.

MoviePass launched in 2012 with an innovative pitch: For around $30 a month, you could watch one movie every day at cinemas. At the time, founder and CEO Stacey Spikes, a former Miramax VP and unabashed movie lover, told me his goal was to "put more butts in seats." But there were issues even before the company officially kicked off. Chains like AMC and Landmark rejected MoviePass during its beta-testing phase in 2011. And it took the company several years to support premium IMAX and 3D showings, something customers demanded from the start.

Years of stagnation led to the company hiring a new CEO in 2016 -- Mitch Lowe, of Redbox fame, who started experimenting with several different monthly prices. Some markets saw rates between $40 and $50 for limited viewing, while other customers were pushed toward a $99 plan for truly unlimited movie watching. The erratic distribution of who received the new pricing, along with the significant increase in cost, led to widespread complaints from the company's small but loyal group of subscribers.

"We're trying to understand all the different considerations about different price points," Lowe told Engadget at the time. He wanted to see what sort of pricing models actually worked for MoviePass, and he quickly discovered that nobody wanted to pay $99 a month. "Our goal was to try to see what the uppermost limit was, and we definitely found that that was too high," he said. And as for the customer confusion with the new rates, he said, it's "the only way to really get a valid test ... If you give people a choice, they almost always take what you'd expect, so you don't learn anything."

Lowe spoke wistfully of transitioning MoviePass to a $20 monthly plan in 2016, but this never happened, because only a year later it was acquired by Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), which gave it enough cash for its more ambitious $10 rate. (Full disclosure: HMNY also bought Moviefone from Engadget's parent company, Oath, which ultimately gives Oath a stake in MoviePass.) But even though that cheap plan led to insane amounts of buzz and more than three million subscribers, it was obvious from the start that MoviePass couldn't keep up. It still had to pay full ticket prices anytime anyone actually used the service, and without any major new moneymaking ventures, it was forced to subsidize everything with investment funding.