( Screenrant ) “While there are mounting concerns about the service’s longterm viability (stock prices have gone down), MoviePass seems to be as strong as ever and benefitting the film industry. More people are going to the theater because of MoviePass, seeing a wider variety of titles than they normally would. Additionally, MoviePass just launched a new venture where they are getting into the business of distributing their own films, such as American Animals. As the company continues to evolve, they have a number of exciting developments planned.”

This was a really enlightening interview as a frequent moviepass user that had concerns about their long term viability. When I first heard about the service last year, I honestly thought there was no chance it lasted with a rate that low. I assumed that it was a flash in the pan type deal that was thanks to some new-age venture capitalist meta-brain thinktank. So, obviously, I signed up right away. I was always going to see the major releases for the podcast, but moviepass has 100% drove me to watch a lot of mid to small budget movies that I ended up loving.

Regardless of how much I was loving it, month after month I’ve just been waiting for the bottom to fall out and it just hasn’t. I’m still using it every non-premiere showing I go to and everyone other person in the theater is pulling out that same signature red card that I am. This interview helped Theodore Farnsworth shed a lot of light both on how their situation looks outside of clickbait headlines, and what their plans for the future are. These were my biggest takeaways.

Farnsworth understands that the current theater model is antiquated, and that every major theater sitting in the flames saying “This is fine” won’t fix that. It’s way easier for him to say from the outside, but the fact that he recognizes it and has a pretty workable solution is promising. Their current state of affairs is supposedly better than it looks as well. While their stock price took a dip, they’re apparently still liquid considering they bought a production house and released a pretty big and very well received picture. The pushback they’ve been getting from AMC seems to be self defeating. He mentions how they took out 10 AMCs and instead of getting customer blowback, they had a huge uptick in traffic at the remaining AMCs rose up to 30%.

We knew they were helping smaller movies, like I had mentioned earlier, but the extent of it is wild. Farnsworth says they were doing $35,000 a screen on ‘American Animals’ compared to the $6,000 average. As much as blockbuster movies can be fun, it’s awesome to see independent movies (and theaters) get both a fighting chance and a financial reward.

They’re looking to expand internationally, which you’d have to think would benefit them tremendously considering China and Russia are the biggest markets next to us. They are apparently rolling out the bring-a-friend and family plan very soon. This is being introduced because of research that shows 50% of all moviepass users bring someone who doesn’t have moviepass with them. Farnsworth said that the $9.95 rate will stay for these, but I don’t really understand how.

The best quote is this:

“When I bought into MoviePass, I really bought into the fact that Mitch [Lowe], my partner who’s the co-founder of Netflix and also started RedBox in the early days, and I knew he was a disrupter that way. They thought Netflix was gonna go away. Blockbuster said Netflix will never work for years, and all the studios and everybody else said it wouldn’t work and now look. They have a market cap bigger than Disney 20 years later.”

As a relatively early Netflix subscriber(I think the first DVD my family rented from them was ‘Madagascar’) I always made fun of Blockbuster for not seeing their doom coming. Now the more I think about it, that’s basically what I was doing with Moviepass by expecting them to fail. Although I’m not a finance guy and don’t know if anything he said will work out, he spoke fancy enough to fool my dumb brain and make me a believer.

*Edit: Farnsworth was originally refered to as the CEO of Moviepass when he is actually CEO of Helios and Matheson (which owns MoviePass). Mitch Lowe is the MoviePass CEO*

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