[slg]

What you are describing was their hope for the future business model, but it never materialized for a variety of reasons. The biggest being they were trying to brute force their way into making themselves a middleman in an industry without generating any value in that industry. All the extra value that theaters saw was not created by increased demand from consumers, it was simply paid for by MoviePass's investors. Like you said, the theaters are just betting they can wait that out. Maybe MoviePass thought it could be a middleman similar to Netflix or Spotify, but neither of those companies had to pay full retail cost for everything a customer watched/listened to.