January 22

Today’s Genre-ary documentary was found on MAX called MoviePass, MovieCrash, which looks upon the rise and collapse of the movie subscription service MoviePass.

According to IMDB, MoviePass, MovieCrash is…”Exploring the company founding and the implosion of the business by outside investors who took over the company, left it bankrupt and under investigation.”

Stacy Spikes, the founder of MoviePass, took his idea and made it a phenom. For a limited fee monthly, you could go to a movie a day at any theater. It was a revolutionary concept that helped movie theaters. Hamet Watt was a board member of the company and was a co-founder with Spikes.

As they were trying to build their business, two other men came into the orbit of MoviePass. Mitch Lowe, who became CEO of MoviePass, and Ted Farnsworth, Helios and Matheson’s CEO. Helios and Matheson purchased the company in 2017. In 2018, Spikes and Watt were fired from the company that they had founded.

It was at this point where the company started to pull shady deals because they were hemorrhaging money and they were trying to find a way to bring down costs. The problem was they did not keep the consumer, their customers, in the loop.

They worked it so one of the massive movie releases of the summer, Mission Impossible: Fallout, would be unavailable for their users to go to, despite still taking their money. More and more error messages would come up when attempting to use the MoviePass card and the business was being driven into the ground. Finally the company had to declare bankruptcy.

There is an air of racial tint to this story as well. Spikes and Watt were both African American and, at the time that they were forced out of MoviePass, the rest of the board was all white. The doc touched upon this aspect, which was some of the more fascinating pieces of the story. One would wonder how it would have gone if Spikes and Watts were white.

The story of MoviePass is a remarkable one, a company that took off like a rocket, creating a huge success in the business of theaters only to be brought down by a couple of con artists looking for an easy score. It is an amazing story.