Hi! I recently came across your lovely BF drawing with Ash and Eiji each wearing a heart earring, and it's something that I see often in the fandom. Is the inspiration from official art? I'd go searching for it myself, but I haven't read the manga and I don't want to accidentally see spoilers. But, I'm really curious for this drawing. If you could direct me towards it, I'd really appreciate it. Or if you know someone else who does?
it’s based off this official art in the Angel Eyes artbook!
Hi, I just wanted to ask you about the MoviePass thing? Apparently I've been living under a rock or something because its the first I've heard of it. I've read a few articles on it, but I was hoping to get some insight from just a customer. Do you think its worth it? Have you had any issues with it? Because it all seems really convenient and that seems too good to be true. Thanks in advance!
Hi! Yes, I’m more than happy to give you some insight into my MoviePass experience. There are definite benefits and drawbacks, but for me personally, I do think it’s been worth it overall, though that could certainly change in the future. Most of the drawbacks for me are potential future issues rather than current ones: I’ve read a lot about where they want to go with all of this, and I could definitely foresee a point at which I might cancel my subscription, but for now I have largely been satisfied with using it in the way that it is currently set up.
I want to give you a really thorough response to your questions here, and in addition to talking about the practicalities of the subscription, it’s going to involve telling you probably more about MoviePass’s business model than you really wanted to know. But you wanted to know if it’s too good to be true or not, and I think that model is largely where the answer lies. I apologize about the length in advance…
Cost and frequency of use
I absolutely love going to the movies, and I typically go alone, which is basically the ideal situation for someone to benefit from a MoviePass subscription. The card can only be used by one person, so if you typically go to the movies with a friend or partner, they would also need their own subscription. At this point, I am going to the movies about once a week, so in an average month I’m going to probably see around 4 movies with my subscription at a total cost of $9.95, which is what the subscription price was when I signed up. (Currently, they’re running a promotion where it’s only $6.95 a month if you pay it as an annual lump sum–it’s $7.95 if you pay per month instead.) As a comparison, during the three months before I got my card in the mail, I saw ten movies at a total cost of $105. Two of those were IMAX showings, which wouldn’t have been eligible for MoviePass, so my total cost if I’d had my subscription then would have been $60.63 (3 months x $9.95, plus $15.39 each for the IMAX showings). Saving 45-ish dollars over the course of those three months wouldn’t have made a huge difference in my wallet obviously, but it’s not nothing either–who wouldn’t take an extra $15 a month if someone handed it to them?
Most people don’t go to the movies that frequently, however, so the savings may not be that great. MoviePass has actually been around since 2011, at various pricing structures, and they’ve found that frequency of attendance seems to be related to the subscription price, which makes sense. The more you pay, the more you’re going to use it to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. They believe that most subscribers will only see about one movie a month at the current price point, and if that’s true, most people aren’t really losing any money from a subscription, but they aren’t really saving anything either. This also really makes me the kind of subscriber MoviePass doesn’t want–someone paying them less than $10 a month to see 4 or 5 movies–but I’m perfectly happy to take advantage of their pricing structure for my own benefit. The benefit you see is definitely going to relate to how often you go and how sustainable that is, too. Even if you go four times the first month you have it, will that eventually taper off?
Some of the cost benefit also depends on when and where you go to the movies, too, though. Back when I was fresh out of undergrad, I decided I wanted to see a movie a week in theaters for an entire year, and so I did, typically going to Sunday morning matinees each week at a cost of $5 a ticket. If MoviePass had been a thing back then, it probably still would have been worth it (that’s still about 10 bucks a month saved), but if you only go once a month and you typically go to matinees, it may work out to cost you more. With my subscription now, however, I’ve been going to Friday night showings, when tickets are $10.99 at my preferred theater, so even one ticket would cost me more than I’m paying per month. If you live in a bigger city, those tickets may cost even more. You just have to look at the costs for yourself and see how much, if any, you’ll actually save there.
Putting your [MoviePass’s] money to work
Another benefit for me is that I’m also seeing more movies now than I probably would have otherwise. Late winter/early spring is usually a bit slower for me, with less out that I want to see, but since almost everything I see after the first movie each month is essentially free, I can take a chance on things I might have waited to try to catch on Netflix or elsewhere (I’m going to come back around to talk more about how this fits into their business model later). MoviePass has referred to this as essentially being “bad movie insurance.” You can take a chance on something, and if you don’t like it, it’s not a big deal because you didn’t really pay for it. So far I haven’t gone to see anything that I would really have considered a risk as to whether or not I would at least somewhat like it, but I have used it to see things I probably wouldn’t have spent my own money to see in theaters. For instance, I went to see a well-reviewed French film at my local art cinema one night earlier this week that I probably would have just waited to watch at home at some point if I could find it, but since it was free to me, hey why not go check it out? Out of the five movies I’ve seen in the last month, I probably would have only gone to two or three of them without the subscription, so getting to see more movies has definitely been a nice bonus.
As a diversity-related sidenote here, I think one of the biggest benefits to seeing more movies than I might otherwise is that I can help generate revenue for the kind of films that I want to see more of. Sometimes in the past a film premise didn’t interest me quite enough to spend my own money on it, but I wished I could support the people making it somehow anyway. Now I can use my MoviePass to do that. The five movies I’ve seen so far this month were a big budget Disney film directed by a black woman, a big studio romcom about a gay teenager, a foreign film about gay men, a foreign film about a trans woman, and a sci-fi film where the five main cast members were women, two of whom were women of color, and one of their characters was a lesbian. It was a really nice mix of films. Now obviously every month probably isn’t going to look like that [unfortunately], but I am happy to have the chance to throw MoviePass’s dollars at films created by, starring, and/or about non-white, non-male, non-cis, and non-straight people whenever possible. We need more of that, and the only way to convince the studios to make more of it is to buy tickets.
Speaking of tickets, let me also note here that the theaters are still getting paid the full price of these tickets [right now], so they’re not losing out on that revenue, which is particularly important for supporting your local mom and pop or arthouse theater. Now if you know anything about the way theaters work, you’ll know that little revenue is actually made on ticket sales–most of it is made on concessions which is why those typically cost so much–so your local theater isn’t making a bunch extra off of you using your subscription. But it’s also very much not hurting your local theater if you choose to use your card there. MoviePass isn’t paying them some discounted price for your ticket, so the theater is making the same off of you that they would make off of anyone else. This means you can help to support local business with your subscription the same way you would with your own money, and if you see even more movies there now, in the long run small, local theaters could definitely see a boost from this.
Customer service
Ok, so, cost and frequency and the ability to more generously support some causes I care about make the subscription a win for me personally, but obviously there are also drawbacks. Let’s start with my experience in getting my card, which nearly made me cancel my subscription before I even saw my first movie.
When you sign up, they tell you it typically takes about two weeks for you to receive your card. Two weeks come and go, and I have no card. I look in the app, and I notice that my address on file is missing my apartment number (which I remember double-checking when I signed up, so I know I entered it). I try updating it in the app, and every time I add my apartment number to it, it deletes it again and leaves just the rest of my street address. Ok, so clearly there’s some kind of glitch in their system and, putting two and two together, I decide this is probably why I haven’t received my card. Not a huge deal–I’ll just reach out to customer service and get another one sent. There’s a chat feature in the app for contacting customer service. I send them a message, 24 hours come and go, and no response. I send them an email through their website instead. 48 hours come and go, and no response. Now I’m really irritated, so I take to publicly shaming them for their poor customer service on Twitter, and within probably 20 minutes, I get a reply telling me to DM them with my issue. Finally got their attention, though it’s sad I had to resort to that tactic, but ok, here we go, I tell them the problem, they update my address manually and say they’ll send me a new card.
Two more weeks come and go, and of course, I still have no card. I have to DM them twice more on Twitter to get them to respond, at which point I get a different customer service agent who is basically like, sorry, that person didn’t send it when they should have and we’re sending it for real now. Major eye roll.
At this point I definitely had to stop and consider whether or not the subscription was actually worth it because their customer service was not giving me great confidence. (One saving grace of their subscription model here is that your first month doesn’t actually start until you activate your card, so I wasn’t paying extra subscription fees while I waited for the card to arrive, which is a large part of the reason I decided to stick it out.) Finally, now that it’s been six weeks since I signed up, I get my card in the mail. But of course, the card number showing in the app doesn’t match (it’s probably the first card they sent), so I have to contact customer service yet again to have them update the card number. I email them through the website again just to give that another go, and this time I get a response in just a couple hours, thankfully, and then everything is good to go.
So my initial experience with their customer service team was a bit hairy, but I have had no problems at all using the card and haven’t had to contact them since then. Another part of the reason that I held on instead of cancelling is that all the other people I know who also have a subscription have said that in the rare instances that they’ve had an issue using their card somewhere, they’ve been able to contact customer service and get it taken care of in time to still make the showing they were trying to go to. I haven’t had any problems with the card yet, so I don’t have experience with that part myself, but everyone else I’ve talked to about it only had good things to say about their customer service experiences. My impression from reading around about it is that their customer base has grown more quickly than their customer service capabilities, and it looks like most of their employees and resources must be going toward dealing with pressing issues, like people who are standing at the theater and unable to use their card, rather than things that can wait a little longer, like shipping a new customer their card. That’s my impression at least–I don’t have any solid source to really back that up–but it does seem from anecdotal data that their customer service has been getting better in recent months compared to what it once was (or maybe that’s wishful thinking). I can only hope they keep improving.
Quirks of the service
There are a few other things that could potentially be drawbacks for others, though I find them to be minor inconveniences at worst. Unless you live somewhere that offers e-ticketing through the MoviePass app (there are only three or four theater chains that offer it so far, none of which operate where I live), you cannot buy tickets online in advance. At most, you could go to the theater in the morning and purchase a ticket for a showing that evening, but you would still have to physically go to the theater to do that. And I believe that even if you have an e-ticketing theater, you can still only buy same-day tickets; the difference is just that you can buy them from home before you leave.
The way it works when you want to go to a movie [at a regular, non e-ticketing theater] is that you pull up the app on your phone, find your theater, and check in for the showtime you want to attend. Then MoviePass will load the cost of the ticket onto your card, which is essentially just a regular MasterCard debit card, and you go to the box office and purchase your ticket with it. The finer details of how that works though are that you have to be within 100 yards of the theater before you check in, and you have 30 minutes from the time you check in to purchase your ticket. Therefore, you can’t check in from home and go to the theater whenever–you have to already be there. Checking in also doesn’t reserve you a ticket in any way; it essentially just lets MoviePass know how much money they need to load onto your card, so in theory you could decide to go to a showing and then when you go to buy a ticket, it’s sold out. If that happens, you can easily switch your check-in in the app to a different film or showtime, but it could certainly be annoying to get there and not be able to attend the showing you were planning to go to.
None of this has been a problem at all for me, but I know from reading things online that some people have found it to be inconvenient. Typically, I drive to the theater and check in from my car in the parking lot, and by the time I walk to the box office, the card is loaded and ready to go. I haven’t seen anything yet that I thought might sell out, and I also always get to the theater really early, which cuts down on those kinds of issues. Before I got my subscription, I did usually buy my tickets online in advance, but for most showings it doesn’t really make a difference if I have to wait and buy it the day of. If there’s something that I still feel the need to buy in advance, it’s probably a big event movie like Black Panther, which I saw in IMAX and wouldn’t have been able to use my subscription for anyway. And I personally wouldn’t have a problem paying for that occasional ticket separately even for a showing that would have been covered for my subscription, just for the benefit of knowing that I would for sure have a ticket.
Related to that, you can’t use your card to see any movies that have an upcharge of any sort–no 3D, no IMAX, no Fathom Events, etc. The amount that loads onto your card is just the typical price of a standard ticket for that time of day, so you won’t be able to use it on anything that costs more than that. I do really like to go to Fathom Events showings, so that is sort of a drawback, but I also get why they wouldn’t cover those things in their current model. Case in point: I was thinking about going to go see the Fathom Events screening of Julius Caesar on Thursday, and it was $24 for a ticket. If I were them, I wouldn’t pay for you to go to that either, lol.
The future of MoviePass
All of this brings me around to my last set of points. In terms of doing what it says it does–allowing you to see one standard, 2D movie a day, every single day, for a low monthly cost–I think MoviePass is great. You said in your question that it seems too good to be true, and at the moment I would say that it really and absolutely is that good.
But that’s going to change.
If everything stayed exactly the way that it is now, this business model would be completely untenable. From all indications, MoviePass is basically bleeding money. They have around 2 million subscribers (projected to grow to 5 million by the end of 2018), and if the majority of them are seeing even just one movie a month with the company paying the theaters the full ticket price on each of those transactions, with some customers like me seeing several more, they’re clearly operating at a loss. They even fully admit that they’re not making money right now. So what is their goal? How do they plan to make money off of this?
First of all, there’s your data. Since everything is done through the app, they’re collecting all kinds of data about when you go to the movies and where and what you see. They know your address, so they know how far you’re willing to drive to see a movie. They know what theaters are closer to you that you pass up in favor of going to the one you prefer. They know how early you arrive before the showing. They know if you’re more likely to see an action movie or a drama or a comedy when you go to a movie on a Tuesday night. They know how long the average subscriber waits after a movie comes out before they go to see it. I’ve seen conflicting reports about their GPS tracking, but they may know where you go directly after you leave the theater, whether that’s back home or to dinner or wherever. They’re getting all kinds of insight into the moviegoing experiences of their subscribers, and you and I both know they’re absolutely selling that data to theater chains, to studios and distributors, to whoever wants to know about putting butts into movie theater seats. Clearly I don’t consider this enough of a drawback for me not to subscribe–basically who isn’t collecting and selling your data at this point?–but if you’re someone much more concerned about that kind of thing, obviously this may be a make or break point for you.
They’re also going to use that data for their own purposes to promote particular theaters or particular showings or particular movies over others, giving them a couple ways of using that data themselves to make money. First, they have started to co-purchase films. They know what their subscribers like to watch, so they can buy films they know you would want to see, and then they have the means already in place to promote those films directly to you. Earlier I said I’d come back to the idea of seeing movies you otherwise might not see in theaters. This is where that comes in to play for MoviePass’s bottom line. Even if it’s not a movie that you would typically make the effort to see in theaters, they promote it enough that you think, eh why not, it’s basically free. When you check it out, now a portion of the ticket revenue is going right back to MoviePass, which helps to balance out the money they’re losing on other ticket sales. Then if the movie is any good, that improves word of mouth, more non-subscribers go to see it, and even more money goes into MoviePass’s pockets. On top of that, they get a part of the dvd/digital sales, too.
I think that this is something to keep an eye on–the kinds of things that they purchase and how they go about promoting them, particularly in terms of what’s happened recently with social media, where political influences have been made to extents that we’re really just beginning to comprehend. Now I’m not overly worried about it, and I’m not saying that MoviePass is going to turn into the propaganda arm of a foreign entity–I think it’s ultimately not going to be any more insidious than Netflix or Hulu in terms of promoting its own content over others–but it is obviously still important to look at the types of films they’re buying and/or promoting as they get further involved in that part of their business. As their subscriptions grow, they will have a lot of power to influence what we see and when we see it, both for films they have purchased and films that distributors have paid them to promote, and as consumers, we always need to be critical of the hows and the whys of what anyone is promoting.
The other way they want to make money is from the theaters, and what they want is a discount on tickets and, ideally, a cut of concession sales. As I mentioned earlier, concessions are where theaters make their money, and MoviePass wants a portion of it in return for driving more traffic to their doors. Their subscribers as a whole go to the movies more often and tend to spend more money on concessions as well (if you didn’t really pay for a ticket, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to then drop $5 on a coke or popcorn), so as their customer base grows, they will have more power to bargain with the big theater chains over it. If AMC, for instance, isn’t interested in cutting MoviePass a deal, maybe some of their busier showtimes disappear from the app. Maybe some of their more popular theaters no longer appear. Maybe the card is no longer valid at AMC at all. MoviePass already knows from all that data they’re collecting that there’s a Regal or a Cinemark across town that their subscribers are willing to drive to if they can use their card there instead, so they can choose to withhold their customers’ business from AMC in whatever ways they want. Right now, their customer base is still small enough that this isn’t going to have a huge effect, but if the numbers continue to grow, they’re going to reach a tipping point where they can begin to put that kind of pressure on the theater chains. It’s really just a matter of when that’s going to happen, not if.
Final thoughts
At the end of the day, I think that if you typically see more than one movie a month, it’s probably worth giving it a go. You can cancel at any time if you decide it’s no longer worth it (you’re barred from signing up again for 9 months after cancelling, btw, in case that’s a concern). For me, signing up was really a question of why not? Why not give it a try? At the moment, it’s still a free-for-all in terms of where and when you can use your card. That means there are 16 theaters within 15 miles of my flat where I can use the card for any showtime of any standard film, as frequently as once a day.
I have one theater that I choose to go to on a regular basis, even though it’s not the closest one to where I live, because I like the theater itself–it’s always decently clean, the seats are in good shape, the screens are a nice size even in the smaller theaters, and there’s a bar so I can buy a drink and take it in with me, lol. The only reason I would go to a different theater right now is if there’s something they’re not showing. That’s pretty rare–typically it’s either that something is playing at the art cinema and nowhere else, or on occasion there’s a Fathom Events screening they don’t get but a different theater does.
But if MoviePass suddenly offered only half the showings I wanted to see there and I couldn’t go at the times I wanted, or perhaps I could no longer use my card there at all, the question becomes, would I switch theaters to keep using my subscription? It’s almost a guarantee that at some point in the not-too-distant future MoviePass is going to ask me to make that choice. They’re going to test the waters with the theaters (and by extension, their subscribers), and some will get on board and some won’t. And the truth is that I don’t yet know my answer. I don’t know yet where I would draw the line between saving money and having a greater choice.
But until that time comes–and it may be coming sooner rather than later–I am more than happy to use their willingness to hemorrhage money to save some of my own.
Sources
I’ve read a ton about the service both before and since I signed up, so I may have referenced something not linked below. I think these cover most of the businessy points though:
One final note: there is a competitor to MoviePass called Sinemia. If you typically see a lot of 3D or IMAX showings, or if you typically go with someone else, you might want to check them out. I don’t know a ton about them, but I do know that they allow you to see [at least some] films with upcharges, they offer a couples plan, and I think they allow you to buy tickets in advance. They do, however, limit you to a set number of movies each month depending on how much you pay (I think you can choose between 2 and 3, iirc). It could be something to check out if that suits your viewing habits.
Edited to add: Check to see if your theater of choice has a rewards program and whether or not you can still use it with MoviePass. Some have disallowed it, but not all. Currently, I’m earning rewards points for every movie that I go to with my subscription, which I can then put toward concessions or tickets to the kinds of screenings MoviePass doesn’t cover.
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