I've been using MoviePass for over three years now. I know the company has been around for a bit longer than that, but I like to think of myself as having been on board fairly early on, having experienced all of the kinks and growing pains of the app.
I watched as they made us take pictures of our ticket stubs that would never seem to upload to the database, or when they hiked the price up from $35 to $50-100 a month as a way of "trying things out". I was also there when you could literally only see a movie every 24 hours, so if I saw a movie at 1:00pm on Tuesday and wanted to go to a 12:45pm showing on Wednesday, I was shit out of luck.
Despite all of this, I loved the app. As broke as I was, I had no complaints with spending $50 a month on MoviePass, because I would end up seeing upwards of $200 worth of movies a month. (Movies are expensive in NYC.) I never complained, I defended the app to death, and I watched as my friends and family abandoned ship before the $10 price drop, but it was always worth it to me. And then I watched as the app got steadily worse and worse as more and more people came onboard; during Oscar season, there seemed to be such an overload of the app in New York that I had trouble going to screenings on Saturday at all, because everyone had gotten MoviePass and it was the cool thing to do.
That being said, I have a couple of complaints to make.
- Get rid of this stupid price hiking. I don't want to have to spend $6 every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday when I go see a movie. The whole point of MoviePass is to pay one flat-rate fee upfront, then not have to worry about how much extra money I'm spending on movies per month. At least when it was $50 a month, I knew how to budget things and I knew that $50 was going towards movies. Living in New York, it's damn near impossible to find a movie that I either haven't already seen or one that isn't affected by surge pricing. What is this, Uber? If I go to a movie every weekend, that's an extra $24 a month that I'm paying. I know it's still saving me money, but it just feels like the "convenience fees" that Ticketmaster makes you pay, where you're paying for something that you can't really get around easily.
- Get rid of the stupid picture-taking system. I know that there are some people out there who are loading up the card and using it to buy clothes at Marshalls or whatever, but it's a real slap in the face to say "We don't trust that you're actually seeing the movie that you're seeing, so send us a picture of your ticket stub as proof." If someone really wants to get around the picture taking system, they'll go find a ticket stub in the auditorium and take a picture of it, but they'll still have used their card for whatever else. It's not that hard to get around, and it's a huge pain in the ass for everyone else. There are times where I've wanted to go see a movie but haven't been able to because I forgot to take a picture of my stub, and because you can only forget to take a picture one time, there's not really any way around it.
- If you are going to charge people for using the app to go see a movie, at least make it for premium screenings. I would rather you let me use the $18 on the card to pay for an IMAX movie and I pay the $7 difference than to pay for a $16 movie when the card is loaded up with $18. MoviePass doesn't loose any money if we're paying for an IMAX screening versus a regular screening, so what's the difference? Let us check in to those movies and let us know that we'll have to pay the difference. It's not rocket science. This is something that both A-List and Alamo Drafthouse are doing.
- Hike the monthly price up. Even if it's just to $15 a month, this will make it so that MoviePass isn't losing money. The company was doing fine before it dropped the monthly price to $10 a month, and a lot of that is because even if someone in New York uses it just once, the company already lose $6 per person on that one transaction. At least with a higher monthly cost, the company has a chance of making money off people in Minnesota or Idaho that only use it once or twice a month on movies that cost $5, and it's still a great deal to a lot of cinephiles that go to the movies anywhere between 5 to 20 times a month. That way, we'll stop getting posts about how MoviePass is dying or dead, and that way it'll still be a better deal than A-List or Drafthouse's program.
Anyways, I just wanted to get that all out. MoviePass is really great and I've enjoyed every second of it, but it's really frustrating when there are problems that can easily be fixed that aren't being addressed.
Submitted July 27, 2018 at 10:15AM by thewisefoolHHH https://ift.tt/2LPRzUJ