MoviePass cuts annual plan, devastating hopeless optimists who think it'll still be around in a year
We’re starting to wonder if MoviePass wasn’t secretly designed as some sort of elaborate scientific experiment on the American moviegoing public, a test to see how crappy you can make a once-beloved service before the frogs notice you’re turning up the heat on their comfortable stovetop bathtub and start hopping out. Today, the company—which has spent the last few months steadily dialing back benefits for its users, from the mythical unlimited film-going experience of yesteryear, to the handful of select films it grudgingly hands out to the masses now every month—announced that it was discontinuing any extra benefits for its annual users, those sweet summer children who bought a subscription to the MoviePass program on the assumption that it would still be up and running a year from now.
Per a recent email to the company’s annual dupes, obtained by Variety:
We want to thank you for being a loyal member of our annual MoviePass plan. Your commitment to MoviePass has contributed to making our vision for an accessible and affordable moviegoing experience a reality. After experimenting with different models and options, we believe that our current monthly plan captures the need of our community—keeping prices low while continually striving to offer a wider selection of films.
At present, MoviePass monthly subscribers get access to three movies a month at a price of $9.95 (which, hilariously, means their business model is still inherently built on operating at a loss), plus access to the depressing cavalcade of “Oopise” emails it issues on a near-weekly basis. Annual subscribers, meanwhile, were paying $89 a year to see a movie every day if they so choose, although they still had to work off of the limited selection that MoviePass has been working from for the last period of its ongoing disasters. (Speaking of: Have fun watching The Happytime Murders this weekend, because neither of the two biggest movies in America, The Meg or Crazy Rich Asians, are on the menu.) MoviePass is offering a refund to annual users unhappy with this latest change.