MoviePass's $9.95 Unlimited Movie Plan (2017–2019)
It promised a movie a day for less than the price of one ticket. The people who signed up took that extremely literally.
In August 2017, MoviePass relaunched with an offer that sounded like a typo: one movie ticket, every single day, for $9.95 a month. Subscribers went from 20,000 to over 3 million within weeks.
The math was the problem from day one. MoviePass paid theaters somewhere between $12 and $15 per ticket while collecting $9.95 total per subscriber per month. The plan selected, almost by design, for the customers most likely to use it constantly — deal-seekers and movie enthusiasts who would see far more than one film a month.
Public filings showed losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars across 2017 and 2018, with some individual quarters losing more than $100 million. MoviePass shut down in September 2019; its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, filed for bankruptcy four months later.
The aftermath went further than most corporate collapses: in 2024, former MoviePass president Mitch Lowe pleaded guilty to securities fraud over the company's public statements during the collapse.
Filed from public reporting: CBS News, Tom’s Guide, TMS Outsource.
