MoviePass Now Limiting Subscribers to Picking Between Two Movies a Day

MoviePass is doing whatever it can to continue being viable, and while its latest movie is just a stopgap to a longer play, many users aren’t going to like it.

MoviePass recently announced that starting in August it will switch to a three movies per month format for the same price point of $9.99, but that doesn’t kick off until August 15th. The current policy is a movie a day, but now users are finding they only have two movies in which to choose from, a far cry from the any movie at anytime tag of the company in times past (via New York Post).

For instance, on Friday fans had the choice of either Slender Man or Mission: Impossible Fallout, which at least are newer releases. Unfortunately, the anytime tag is gone now, as for Mission: Impossible Fallout were for 2:30 and 10:45 at the AMC Empire 25 in Times Square, a big-time theater that certainly has more showings of such a recent film.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe confirmed the new two movie choices a day policy but did say that those movies might change from day to day.

“Unfortunately, in order to stay financially stable we’ve had to curtail the service,” Lowe said. “We had to right the ship as far as the amount of money we were burning.”

Lowe also admitted this is all part of just trying to survive until the new plan comes into play, and it’s been a struggle, as the company has run out of cash for several days in the past.

“This has been a challenging time for us and our customers,” Lowe said. “We’re just trying to save our service to be able to be available long term.”

To put that into context, MoviePass lost around $85 million in June and May and was losing around $20 million a month in the months prior. Lowe and the investors believe that a switch to 3 movies a month will “help to stabilize our business model.”

“Any industry-wide disruption like MoviePass requires a tremendous amount of testing, pivoting, and learning,” Lowe said. “We are now creating a framework to provide the vast majority of subscribers with what they want most — low cost, value, variety, and broad availability — and to bring some moderation to the small number of subscribers who imposed undue cost on the system by viewing a disproportionately large number of movies.”

For now, we’ll have to wait and see if that pans out, but let us know if you plan on sticking around in the comments!