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Comment by SN76477 | Hacker News Reader

I think MoviePass has been successful in showing that the industry needs a shakeup. I dont know what their monetization model was, I dont think they knew what it was.

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But every industry can be shaken up if you're willing to give things away effectively for free with VC money. I don't know if that translates to proving an industry needs a shakeup.

Exactly. It's easy to "shake up" and "disrupt" an industry by spending VC money like it's going out of style. "People like things given away at below market rates" isn't even a proof of concept.

Alamo Drafthouse is testing its own subscription service and AMC already rolled theirs out.

Now maybe it's just coincidental timing but moviepass certainly proved there's a huge interest in that model of movie tickets.

Chain specific subscription services (at more sustainable costs than Moviepass) have been common outside the US for a number of years. Indeed, that's where Moviepass got the idea from. I don't think Moviepass proved much there.

Think of it not as a shake up, but as a wealth transfer from investors to the proletariat.

It's like how Uber has been giving me $3 rides while it posts losses 1/3 of revenue.

I should send VCs a thank you card, those loveable dummies!

I'm not opposed to wealth transfer from investors to proles, I just wish it was more sustainable.

And maybe in the form of health care and not movie tickets. :)

MPs data would kind of help show the supply curve for movies. Something like @Free user X would watch N movies per month. It's an interesting thing because Theaters may consider making movies free, but charging 2x for food...

They need a shakeup, but at the moment the biggest threat is people having big TV's and cheaper snacks at home. The only reason they still exist is because they have a monopoly on movies for a limited time where they don't have to compete with other distribution channels. And that movie studios like to screw up the sound tracks to make watching at home as unpleasant as possible.

I think most theaters will disappear in the long term and they'll become a luxury experience, more like visiting an imax once a year than going to see a movie once a month. Services like MoviePass wouldn't be necessary in that world.

That's pretty much me and movies today. I have the once or twice a year IMAX in the theatre but otherwise just watch at home.

OTOH, there are definitely demographics for whom going to the theatre is a low-friction activity.

I pondered that a bit when I first heard about them. It must be they looked at the number of movies the "fanatic" pays to see, and the number of movies the average person pays to see, per year.

I'm guessing they figured the fanatics would cause enough buzz about their service to convince the average person to subscribe and when enough did they'd turn a profit.

They may have created a formula where they estimated those lines would cross, but at best that would be a "known unknown" and I don't see how an "investor" could fail to realize that. You either have faith that goal can be achieved, or you don't, and faith in such matters is known to be risky.

For me, specifically, it did just the opposite. I look at new listings every Friday, and theaters in my town never seem to have interesting movies.

So even at their low prices it wasn't even worth it to me to try a MoviePass subscription.

I'm guessing the main thing they proved is that there's a small subset of movie fanatics that would see every movie released, some multiple times if they didn't have to pay. They figured out the size of this market and it probably was what killed them i'm guessing.

Like X% of movie pass subscribers saw 10+ movies a month. What was the size of X?

Someone noted they thought movie pass would become payola for movies.

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