The MoviePass, MovieCrash trailer takes us back to the greatest summer ever

The year was 2018, and we were knee-deep in the greatest summer of our lives. After all, the air conditioning is cheap when the movies are free because Moviepass, the frankly ludicrous subscription service, had convinced itself that giving movie tickets away was the fastest way to make a buck. For $9.95 a month, MoviePass would send subscribers a pre-filled debit card to use on movie tickets and spend they did. Movie after movie for just $10 a month, and billionaire investors footing the bill. What’s better than that? But if the trailer for the new HBO Original documentary produced by Mark Wahlberg’s Unrealistic Ideas is to be believed, MoviePass was a mess.

MoviePass, MovieCrash is another documentary about the flailing grifts of private equity. Like Fyre or The Inventor, it presents a story about how some crafty, exploitative executives burned through millions of dollars in hopes of convincing Wall Street that this was a real, functioning business and not an obvious mockery of the entire system that its subscribers knew it was. The difference is, unlike Theranos or the Fyre Festival, the worst parts of MoviePass were customer service-related. No one’s blood was drawn, and no one was trapped on an island with nothing to eat by cheese sandwiches. It was just impossible to get someone to respond to a complaint because there was no money to staff the company.

The documentary teases access to the key players in MoviePass’s rise and fall, as well as the ousting of its original champion for corporate suits who thought “you got to spend money to make money” includes co-financing John Travolta’s Gotti. But the story is a common one today. A startup media company planning to solve consumer issues via a subscription service that could never be profitable, burning through funds on parties, jets, and 50 Cent appearance fees while failing to properly support the people actually working for the company? That’s news to us. We can’t believe MoviePass, a service that everyone would repeatedly joke about being a scam because it so obviously was not going to work, would do such a thing. But, hey, thanks for that one glorious summer. We’ll never forget it.

MoviePass, MovieCrash takes us back to the summer of love on May 29 on Max.