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I've seen 3 movies in theaters in the past year - Star Wars, Greatest Showman, and Avengers. My wife, a Moviepass subscriber, has been to the movies some 60 times since December. She typically goes 30-40 times a year, it's one of her and her friends' favorite hobbies. You might go to coffee or the bar, I might go to the park or the gym, she and her friends love going to the movies. It's just a thing to do for a couple hours on a weeknight. There was no 'abuse' in the sense of sharing her pass among friends, or buying tickets and not going to the movie. She does like a frozen coke sith her movie, and she buys the $35 free refill popcorn bucket 3 times a year, so there was quite a bit of profit for the theater, but she was not profitable to Moviepass and they might feel that normal use for her was abuse. She would not be profitable unless (a) Moviepass can negotiate <50-cent tickets with the theater with kickbacks for concessions, or (b) she convinced enough people close to her (like me) to buy a moviepass and buy fewer tickets than the subscription costs. The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would have spent more on tickets than moviepass. |
This is the crux of the problem, I think. People who see one movie a month are not going to buy it. So they need to be profitable for high-usage customers. Unless they are getting incredible discounts... just not going to work.
For it to make sense, there need to be some restrictions -- e.g., only Sunday through Thursday nights (times when fewer people go to the movies... whatever they might be). But then a lot of people like me, who are too busy to go at that time, will skip it.
If you want me to over-pay for an option, it needs to have some intangible value. For example, if buying a moviepass gave me X times a month that someone else could come "free"... I might value that above market cost, because I could tell others "don't sweat it, it's free" and get friends to come along without feeling I'm pressuring them to spend a lot of money.