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Comment by whipoodle | Hacker News Reader

This is weird. It says MoviePass will pay them the full ticket price when a pass holder goes to a movie in their theaters. Leaving aside how exactly that is supposed to work financially for MoviePass, what is AMC's actual problem with this? It's just a bunch of "not in the best interest of blah blah".

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It (the linked statement) seems to read "we don't like this at all but it looks like there's nothing we can do about it right now, but we're sure going to look for a way to stop it".

The part they don't like is probably the general feeling that this will devalue their product. Ticket prices already "feel" high to the general public. Having advertised services out there (even if ultimately untenable) that drastically undercut standard prices will not help this perception at all.

Yeah, that makes sense. This still leaves them in the position of griping about getting money when people see movies in their theaters, though.

MoviePass would have brought more viewers to their establishment. The customer would now have saved $10 on admission, and can now use that towards concessions. Since their concessions are basically 1000% markup, its pure profit for them.

I don't understand their complaint other than, they didn't think of it first.

No they're still making full price on tickets too, it's just that the money is coming from some VC that's willing to dump it for a bunch of data instead of directly from the customer.

I suspect there's a secondary reason too.

MoviePass is dropping their pricing to $10/month, this screams out "Hail Mary" to me. I wouldn't be surprised if MoviePass was on its last legs financially (they just sold a majority stake, see http://variety.com/2017/film/news/moviepass-1202527956/) and their contracts with the chains could potentially leave the chains with millions of dollars of owed ticket money if they suddenly stop operating.

If that's the case, no wonder AMC are trying to get out of it.

I doubt MoviePass will pay full retail price. I bought 100 gold AMC movie passes on eBay for $550 maybe ten years ago. That was $5.50 per movie. You can get substantial discounts on admission if you buy in big enough blocks.

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