Name: The Shaky Economics Of MoviePass
Uploaded: 2026-02-14T17:20:46.000Z
Duration: 6 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

It's likely that by now you've heard about MoviePass, the subscription service that allows you to see one movie per day in theaters for $9.95 a month.

Modal verbs - A2

Except you can't see a movie more than once.

You have to be 100 yards from the theater to book the ticket, and

during search times, you might have to pay a little extra.

But despite all that, MoviePass is still a pretty good deal.

In fact, the deal might be too good for MoviePass.

Just as you've probably heard about MoviePass, you've probably also heard the company is losing money faster than a Tarantino henchman loses.

MoviePass charges $9.95 a month, and the average movie ticket in America costs $9.16.

When you see a movie with MoviePass, they pay the full price of the ticket, as if they were buying a normal ticket for a friend.

That means if you see just two movies a month, MoviePass is losing double what it gains from you, more if you're buying in a city where ticket prices are more expensive.

Multiply that by 3 million friends and you can see why MoviePass is in a lot of trouble financially.

According to the best estimates, the average MoviePass subscriber sees about 1.5 movies a month.

And even though that's not three movies, or even two, the numbers are still lopsided, and

that 0.5 of a movie is bleeding them dry.

In 2017, the company that owns MoviePass, Helios and Matheson, lost $150 million.

And in May, the company revealed in an SEC filing that it's losing $21.7 million per month on average at that time.

And at that rate, they only had enough cash available to stay solvent for two more months.

It's two months later now, and, well, the website still works, so that's a good sign.

If you're consistently losing money as a business, there's only one way to stay afloat.

By finding investors to give you money in the hope that someday you'll be profitable in the future.

Investors like those investing in Spotify or Uber or Dropbox or Blue Apron, all companies that have yet to become profitable.

In fact, of the 108 companies that went public in 2017, over three quarters weren't profitable.

Now, not all unprofitable companies are created equal.

Amazon was unprofitable for years, but it had the revenues.

It was just putting them back into investments.

In the case of MoviePass, the revenue just isn't enough to pay for the costs.

It says it always knew it was going to lose money on its path to acquiring more subscribers and greater market share.

And to be fair, the growth of the company has been impressive.

Last August, MoviePass only had 20,000 subscribers when they lowered their price to $10 a month.

they're approaching 3 million, with projections of up to 5 by the end of the year.

the reason they haven't yet raised it substantially to stem their losses, is that it's supposed to attract the 51% of moviegoers who only see about three to six movies a year, people who might pass on $20 or even $15 but can't resist 10.

These people, the theory goes, will bring the average movie per subscriber down.

But MoviePass needs to look for cash in other places, too.

The original idea was that it could use the app to track the moviegoing habits of its use, sell that data to studios for targeted advertising and to restaurants nearby the theater, who could advertise to customers when they're in the area.

MoviePass thinks that eventually, if it can grow enough, it can negotiate a percentage of the new business it's bringing to theaters and the surrounding stores.

It thinks that it could potentially even get a slice of a theater's only real moneymaker, concessions.

Let's see what the CEO of America's largest theater chain has to say about that.

AMC has absolutely no intention, I repeat, no intention of sharing any.

I repeat, any of our admissions revenue or concessions revenue.

There are a lot of forces at work in the movie theater ecosystem, and

So theater chains have been raising ticket prices.

And higher ticket prices means people see fewer movies still and don't take chances on what they do see.

Most ticket revenues get kicked out back to the studios, who leverage their power to get even more percentage.

And now here comes a subscription service devaluing the price of a ticket in the minds of consumers, asking for a cut of concessions.

And yet MoviePass is bringing them business.

Its users are taking chances again, seeing movies on a whim again.

It's bringing more people to the movies more often.

The studios don't want to pay for the data, the theaters don't want to cut them in, and

MoviePass subscribers are just seeing too many movies.

There's a size at which this would all change 20 million subscribers?

Can MoviePass get to that critical size before it runs completely out of money?

Until then, it is genuinely one of the best deals in town, something I thought I'd never see.

A bunch of rich investors taking millions of people out to the movies.

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