MoviePass Reaches 1 Million Tickets Sold and Turns First Profit
By ETCentric Staff
February 20, 2024
MoviePass says it has sold more than 1 million tickets since relaunching last spring, and has also announced the first profitable year in the company’s 13-year history. Co-founder and CEO Stacy Spikes, who purchased the company out of bankruptcy in 2021, is giving artificial intelligence much of the credit for the turnaround. The MoviePass Cinematic Marketplace is an aggregator for the theatrical industry that uses AI and machine learning to improve attendance engagement and ticket sales. Spikes says hitting the milestones “highlights the powerful impact” the technology enhancements have had “from the previous business model.”
MoviePass uses a proprietary algorithm to allocate credits to movies based on a variety of factors, including days of the week and volume of business at participating theaters. MoviePass members pay to subscribe, then purchase tickets using the credits that come with their selected membership level.
The system “helps drive exploration of titles looking to compete against movies with much larger budgets,” according to MoviePass, which says in an announcement “that on average, there is a 40 percent shift to theater location offering the same movie for fewer credits.” The internal research also found that “members increase midweek attendance by 50 percent and go to an average of 2.4 different theater locations while using their MoviePass subscription.”
A CNET reporter says his own interaction with MoviePass found the system offers the most savings for weekday showings, but was priced almost identically to other first-run theater chains when attending “a new movie on a Friday night.” The writer goes on to call the recent milestones “particularly notable” considering the company’s tumultuous past.
Business Insider writes that “the movie-ticket-subscription service had become the butt of jokes for a couple of years when it famously dropped its monthly price to an unsustainable $10 a month in 2017, which led to a predictable bankruptcy.” Inc. recounts the downfall, and says Spikes paid only $140,000 to purchase the company at a liquidaton auction.
Though Spikes hasn’t revealed the number of memberships MoviePass has sold since its relaunch, nor publicly shared revenue, Business Insider says it was able to confirm the CEO’s profitability claim by “viewing internal data.”
