I just couldn’t, for the life of me, jump onboard the MoviePass train. Why? Well, here’s the thing, I mostly go to press screenings and festival screenings for my movie consumption. Which means that I watch my cinema with mostly respectable audiences and not Average Joe moviegoers (texters, noisy eaters, drink-slurpers, constant bathroom-breakers, late arrivers, chit-chatters as Jeffrey Wells has alluded to). Whenever I do buy a ticket, I am almost guaranteed to be irked by somebody around me doing all those sacrilege things and not paying attention to the screen. Blasphemy! With all that being said, consider me uninterested in Sinemania, AMC Stubs-a-List, and the now in trouble Moviepass.
Yes, MoviePass is on the verge of collapse. According to an SEC filing on Friday (via Business Insider), MoviePass admitted that they had to borrow $5 million in cash to take care of a “service interruption” on Thursday. The subscription service ran out of cash and the lights got cut off.
The official filing read:
“The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Company’s merchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass, Inc. (‘MoviePass’), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018.”
MoviePass tweeted, “We are still experiencing technical issues with our card-based check-in process and we are diligently working to resolve the issue.” This was followed by another tweet saying, “We’ve determined this issue is not with our card processor partners and will be continuing to work on a fix throughout this evening and night.”
The Playlist’s Charles Barfield says: “Obviously, the company isn’t going to tweet, “Shit, we ran out of cash, our bad!” but these tweets are clearly hiding the bigger issue. And it’s something that is what we all expected to happen.