If you circled end of July 2018 on the calendar back in October of last year when you and your coworkers drew up your “When will MoviePass go under?” betting pool, congratulations—it’s looking like you might take home that purse of cash. Which you can then use to buy movie tickets, since your MoviePass might be for shit.
CNN reports the company ran out of money to pay for customers’ tickets on Thursday night, resulting in a service outage wherein cardholders complained they were unable to purchase tickets with their accounts. Helios and Matheson, the parent company of MoviePass, said that it had missed a payment to one of its fulfillment processors, thereby triggering that company temporarily suspending payments to the subscription service. And yes, you and I are accidentally (or regrettably necessarily) late on payments all the time, but it’s a little different when a company runs out of money to meet its ability to, you know, keep functioning as a company. Who would’ve thought suddenly charging customers more to see a movie during peak hours wouldn’t single-handedly leave you flush with cash?
Helios and Matheson suggest customers wait to hear about a resolution, though in the meantime they can continue to use e-ticketing for purchases, which has apparently not been affected by the outage. MoviePass’ stock dropped by roughly half its value this morning—and given the company pulled a reverse stock split earlier this week to keep stock prices high enough to avoid being pulled off the Nasdaq, that means the pre-reverse split value of a share of MoviePass is currently worth roughly 1.5 cents.