Less than a month after announcing it had surpassed 2 million subscribers, MoviePass is starting to slowly remove policies. Since April 13, new subscribers of the discount-movie-ticket-app have not been entitled to the company’s flagship one movie-per-day monthly subscription package. However, CEO Mitch Lowe told Variety on Wednesday that the MoviePass movie-a-day-monthly will be made available once again.
In mid-April, MoviePass began offering only one promotional $29.95 three month plan that included a free trial of iHeartRadio’s All Access on-demand streaming package. The seemingly sudden reversal of the company’s core product had many signaling alarm bells, with fears that the service was not making enough money to hang on. Reports have shown that MoviePass operates on “negative cash flows,” so any change in the company’s offerings is picked apart by critics who believe the system is just too good to be true. However, Lowe has dispelled those fears.
“We never planned to abandon the flagship product that everybody loves,” Lowe told Variety. “Any time we’ve done a promotional package, we’ve taken the monthly plan off our site.”
“It’s marketing 101,” he said. “We wanted to focus everybody on this partnership promotion. If people knew the [movie-a-day] plan was coming back, they might not be interested in the iHeartRadio deal.”
Whether you want to believe that or not, it should be noted Lowe recently said something very different at CinemaCon just days ago. “Do you think you will go back to a movie a day?” The Hollywood Reporter asked Lowe. “I don’t know,” he replied.
Nevertheless, this is not the only change to the MoviePass policies that has upset users. Last month, MoviePass announced it will now ban users from seeing the same movie twice. Lowe attributed this change to an attempt at preventing fraud. “A small percentage of people are abusing the system,” he said. “By doing this we can continue to provide a great service."
Unfortunately, many got wind of the restriction just as the oh-so-rewatchable Avengers: Infinity War hit.
