I brought you the news of the startup company MoviePass and their big ideas with more than a little enthusiasm, as the idea of a $50 unlimited theater-going pass was rather attractive to a guy like myself. Looks like we all bought their pitch a little overmuch though, as the damn company didn’t even have its ducks in a row when they launched the idea. Turns out that AMC and Landmark have told them exactly where they can shove their Netlix-style theater buffet app (spoiler alert: It’s their asses. They told them they could shove it up their asses), and the company has canceled their much promoted San Francisco test run.
I wonder how much money they threw away on the thousands of free tickets they were buying for people as a promo contest…
The story is more than a little pathetic, as a group with a good idea seems to have really fucked up the follow through. Deadline brought the news first as a conversation with Stacy Spikes, an entrepreneur behind Moviepass, which foretold grim tidings for the services impending test run. Soon after that news went up though, came the update that the presumptuous little startup had completely shuddered their test event.
As much as I’m attracted to their idea, I’m not sure we’re going to see any paradigm-changing services engineered by a bunch of dooffuses that didn’t even court the theater chains in question before launching a high-profile announcement contest/sample run. With all this egg on their face, will the company be able to move on at all? I disagree with Mike Fleming- they’ll probably try this again with as many indie theaters as they can scrape together. Of course, whether or not it will gain any traction from something like that is another matter entirely.
Oh well. It really is a bummer to see a good idea so badly handled but, as is so often the case, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably was an idea suggested by a bunch of silly twats that couldn’t even be bothered to make some phone calls before opening their fat mouths about their controversial startup company! That’s how that adage goes, right?
Think MoviePass has a shot at picking itself back up and shaking things up, or is this the last we’ll hear of this particular pipe dream? My twitter feed is one place to shout a thought at me, or you can toss a comment down below, or get into the conversation on the boards.
3 comments
It’s like the filmmaker who writes their Oscar acceptance speech before the screenplay – which is based on a napkin scribble along the lines of:
“Will Smith + Predator = $$$”
There’s literally no thinking going on relating to the mechanics of their “idea”.
I was wondering what kind of strangle hold they had on the concept. What would stop AMC from launching it’s own version of the program to generate more traffic, since it’s their concessions that stand to profit. The movie pass concept would be better for consumers with theater choice (Landmark shows the artier films and AMC multiplexes are stuffed with newest mainstream releases here) but a player as large as AMC could look at it as getting people who are on the fence about a film to come in now rather than waiting for netflix or DVD/BluRay.
Damn it! I was really hoping this could have worked. Would have been a life saver for me, considering that I am at the theater for most of my life! DAMN IT
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