MoviePass Worked Out Great
Also sidecars, bank supervision and blockchain pivots.
Is there a Harvard Business School case study of MoviePass yet?1 I feel like there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the MoviePass story, but maybe that’s wrong. Maybe all of the lessons are just “if you do the opposite of normal business things, it will work, but only for a while.” Maybe business school students should actively avoid learning that lesson.
Anyway Jason Guerrasio has a big story on the rise and fall of MoviePass at Business Insider today. The basics of the story—MoviePass was a business that charged people $9.95 a month to see unlimited movies in theaters, and then paid the theaters full price for the tickets, losing money on each transaction and eventually falling into a huge and comical financial hole—were familiar to me, and probably to you, and it’s not like we didn’t already know it was weird. But I learned a lot from this article about how weird it was. For instance, under founder Stacy Spikes, MoviePass charged $50 a month for its service, but couldn’t get enough subscribers to break even. Then it was acquired by Helios & Matheson Analytics, whose chief executive officer, Ted Farnsworth, came up with the idea of charging much less: