MoviePass is back. The question is whether it makes sense in the world that the pandemic has left us

Moviepass was known at the time as “the Netflix of cinemas”: a subscription system for movie theaters that was even said to land in Spain in 2019, without its arrival being confirmed. There was nothing surprising about this expansion: the service, born in 2011, had become a phenomenon in the United States and although each country has its own distribution systems in theaters, its owners were looking for new markets. After an announcement of bankruptcy and a period of post-pandemic reflection, it announces news and a relaunch.

The return of MoviePass. Some days ago, Business Insider announced that the service was going to be relaunched in beta on American Labor Day, the first Monday in September (this year it falls on the 5th). Interested parties can sign up at MoviePass website to receive an invitation of your own and 10 invitations to give away. In statements to puckthe company’s CEO Stacy Spikes spoke of 30,000 registrations in the first five minutes of opening subscriptions.

The three prices available in this new stage are 10, 20 and 30 dollars per month, and each of them will have different benefits. This beta phase will not include one of the most attractive options of the original MoviePass, that of a daily movie for the entire month. Tickets can be purchased through the service’s app or, once you have the famous card, at any theater box office that accepts Mastercard, which has reached an agreement with the company. it will leave the branding red that the service had, and becomes black.

And how does the new plan work? With a credit system. Movies will be priced differently based on demand: a Marvel movie will take almost all of that credit, while smaller releases will cost less. The value of the credits will be set in agreements with the cinema chains, although at the moment the three big Americans (AMC, Regal and Cinemark) have not reached any type of agreement with GamePass.

A career full of ups and downs. Up to this point, MoviePass has gone through a series of ups and downs in its journey. In 2017 and 2018 it seemed that the idea of ​​a subscription system in this context (cinema tickets as a serviceto use another term from the entertainment industry) was unbeatable, but soon after the company declared bankruptcy.

The reason is that in 2017 the platform was acquired by Helios and Matheson, a data analysis company, and Spikes was fired by email, a position to which he has ended up returning. The initial fee of $30 a month went to $10 (slightly more than the traditional price of a single ticket) with the possibility of seeing one movie a day. The accounts played against MoviePass, which paid full price for those tickets to theaters. Subscriptions went from 20,000 to 100,000 in two days, and to 3 million in less than a year. Major chains in the United States such as AMC and Regal stopped accepting the service.

At the time of GamePass’s greatest success, 6% of all tickets in the country were purchased through the service, and even more in the case of genres such as documentaries or non-blockbuster films, which the public was encouraged to see knowing he had nothing to lose. In a survey cited by Puck, half of subscribers said they went to see movies they wouldn’t normally go to thanks to the “free entry” GamePass provided.

MoviePass returns. https://t.co/61uUqc5vVC pic.twitter.com/CqzpQ1uUvs

—MoviePass (@MoviePass) August 22, 2022

Does the return of Game Pass make sense? As we know, cinema has completely changed in the post-pandemic years. The famous and feared “new normality” in few scenarios has permeated as much as in the entertainment industry. We have become accustomed to the platforms of streaming be our primary source of cinema and series supply, at their own pace (which we set -or so we believe-) and to pay a fixed price for an unattainably unattainable amount of content.

That is to say, GamePass is in tune with the new form of audiovisual consumption to which we have become accustomed, but it collides with a great wall, perhaps the last great wall of the traditional exhibition: the stability of the rooms hangs by a thread and they are little experimental friends. Much more when most of the chains already have their own bonuses and monthly passes with freedom to choose what you want to see.

But there is another monster that theaters have to face: they have the mission of revaluing the cinematographic experience, communicating to viewers that it is worth paying extra to see a special film in a special room. A complex message in times of binge watching series and movies all cut from the same pattern at very low cost. Or put another way: from the perspective of the rooms, is GamePass and its free bar of tickets an ally for the new times or the same dog with a different collar?