The average movie ticket costs $8.95. In major metropolitan areas, you can easily spend twice that. So the economics behind subscription service MoviePass’s new plan—$10 per month, for as many movie trips as you can stomach—seem at least halfway insane. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find a scheme that doesn’t just potentially save you a stupid amount of money but wants to help save the movie theater business. If only it could convince the movie theaters.

For moviegoers, the $10 MoviePass plan offers a monthly cinematic smorgasbord for the price of a fancy sandwich. For MoviePass, it’s a bid to increase its current 20,000-person subscriber base by a few orders of magnitude. But while it could represent a short-term windfall for theaters—MoviePass pays them full freight for each viewing, excepting a few instances where they get a small discount—the industry has reacted with alarm. “It is not yet known how to turn lead into gold,” said AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the US, in a colorful press release Tuesday night. The company further said that it’s seeking a way to opt out of MoviePass' plan.

So is MoviePass snake oil or a glimmer of hope amidst one of the worst summer box office declines in years? It comes down to how long you like your odds.

One Pass to View Them All

For all the fuss MoviePass has generated this week, you’d think the company hadn’t already existed for more than six years. Then again, there's a reason you also likely haven’t heard of it until now: it hasn’t made a ton of sense.

Its first iteration required a kludgy voucher system; as MoviePass evolved, it phased out home printers but introduced tiered pricing plans that felt barely worth it. Under the previous pricing scheme, introduced last July, going to just two movies per month could cost as much as $21. That’s less than you’d pay buying the tickets outright, but not exactly a take my money-level deal. An unlimited plan, comparable to the $10 version announced Tuesday, would run up to $50 per month. And a cap on ticket allocations meant that MoviePass couldn’t guarantee access to some showings.

As of now, all that’s gone. It’s $10 per month for everyone, no matter how many movies you see. Some restrictions do apply; it’s one movie per day max, and it doesn’t cover 3-D or IMAX. But the ticket limits are gone, and it works at any theater that accepts debit cards, which in 2017, well, you have to work pretty hard to find one that doesn’t.

“What we’re trying to do is remove as much friction as possible from going to the movies,” says Mitch Lowe, MoviePass CEO. “We’re trying to do the same thing Netflix did for DVD rental and home rental, which is remove the barriers to experiment and try smaller films.”

From anyone else, that might sound like bluster. But Lowe, who joined MoviePass in 2016, comes by it honestly. He was on the founding team at Netflix, and he more recently led Redbox through the explosive period of growth that planted DVD-spitting kiosks in most US grocery stores. Now he believes that the box office—crawling to finish off a historically down summer—faces the same maladies that the DVD industry once did. And that he can apply the same cure.

Selling products for dramatically below market value should goose sales plenty. Offer someone a $100 bill for a $10 one and they’ll take it every time. But that raises the question: What exactly does MoviePass get out of this?