The revamped MoviePass goes nationwide
As promised, MoviePass is returning. After last year’s Labor Day beta/waiting list launch, the movie theater subscription service is open to all in the U.S. just head of the Memorial Day holiday. After years of rocky history, the company promised to return to the straight and narrow, with a more measured approach to new movie access, following the free-for-all that was MoviePass 1.0.
“By opening up MoviePass to film lovers nationwide, we are expanding our support of the movie theater industry by helping drive traffic to all theaters during the critical summer season,” 1.0 co-founder and 2.0 CEO Stacy Spikes said in a prepared statement. “Our newly designed service offers our members greater choice and flexibility for how they use their monthly credits, while continuing to encourage them to watch movies in theaters.”
The service is launching across the U.S. with four tiers that start at $10 a month — effectively priced like a streaming service. That Basic level gets you one to three movies a month. If you really, really love new movies and have a lot of free time, a $40 Pro account will get 30 movies a month — at or near a movie a day, depending on the month. The company says its $20 tier is the most popular of the bunch, at three to seven a month.
Things are a bit complicated when it comes to how many movies you can actually see, per pass, as the tiers are actually based on “credits.” The number of credits per film depends on when you see it. Tuesdays use the fewest, then weekday matinees, weekday evenings, weekend evenings and opening weekends at the top of the list.
The good news, however, is that credits roll over, if you don’t use them all up in a month. Says the company, “you can have up to a maximum of two months of unused credits at anytime in your account. For example, if your plan is for 34 credits per month, you can have up to 68 credits in your account. ”
Given everything that went down with the original version of the service, some consumers may — understandably — be a bit wary. Certainly opening things up for Memorial Day is a great way to test the service’s strength.
