By We all knew that this was coming, yet it stings the same: MoviePass is no more. Effective today, parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics announced yesterday that the service, which allowed subscribers to watch a number of movies for a monthly fee, was shutting down. This signifies the end of the service’s struggles, which lasted throughout the past two years. The analytics firm is looking at the possibility of selling MoviePass, Moviefone, and MoviePass Studios.
The company itself couldn’t say it better than us citing that “efforts to recapitalize MoviePass have not been successful to date.” During these past couple of years, the service has shuffled around its policies in desperate attempts of damage control after financial troubles led to service blackouts. Eventually, “technical issues” prevented subscribers from canceling, one of a number of errors and suspicious incidents involving the company.
It was a steep rise for MoviePass, and an even steeper fall. Look no further than to Flixist’s own MoviePass story tag, where you can see for yourself just how that trajectory formed. It was quite fun following and covering this long term story from beginning to end, as it was to watch a couple of rich folks and businesspeople throw money at a failing venture. It was even more fun making those dumb photo edits for these stories too.
I suppose I should thank MoviePass for the few months I used it myself; while their pricing models ended up to be disastrous decisions, many of us thrived and watched a number of movies we might not have seen without such a service. And from the ashes of MoviePass, a number of over competing services have emerged, hopefully all under better and more competent management.
And now the MoviePass Deathwatch has ended. Be sure to look back at our own Hubert Vigilla’s feature The 300, which was made possible by his use of MoviePass.