MoviePass Is Back With Betting

Back in the 2010s, we used to talk about “the MoviePass economy.” There was a company called MoviePass. Its core business model was that you paid it $9.95 per month, and in exchange you got to see as many movies as you wanted in theaters. Movie tickets, back then, usually cost $12 or so, so if you saw even one movie a month this was a good deal for you. How was MoviePass able to offer you that deal? Uh. It went and paid full price for the movie tickets and lost money on every customer. How was that sustainable? Uh! Some of the answers to that question are:

The last point, in particular, was everywhere in the 2010s; thus “the MoviePass economy,” a term I took from Kevin Roose. Venture-backed startups like Uber and WeWork really were racing to achieve scale even as they lost money; venture capitalists would give them piles of money to do that, on the theory that eventually they would be able to flip the switch to profitability. (“You always find product market fit when your product is giving away money.”) MoviePass was the eponym for this because its business model was so clearly absurd, but it was not itself a venture-backed startup; weirdly, it was a division of a public company. In hindsight, this theory was often correct; Uber is profitable now. Sometimes it was not. MoviePass shut down and liquidated in bankruptcy in January 2020.