• by Lou Jordano , Columnist, September 13, 2018

MoviePass: the company that wants to provide a movie ticket subscription package for $10 a month, making an overpriced industry affordable. The company has generated a lot of buzz in the last few months, but a lot of that talk has been negative.

MoviePass is certainly trying to disrupt the film industry, but perhaps it took on more than it could handle. Its adversarial stance certainly helped the company get consumers’ attention, but it also may have set MoviePass up for a fall.

MoviePass has already made a huge impact on the film industry, amassing more than 2 million subscribers. Consumer data suggests the company has been a major factor in luring people back to the cinema.

The aggressive marketing tactics that MoviePass took in its early days to get the word out about its product worked, appearing  to have played a factor in a simultaneous spike in conversation about going to the movies.

Brand recognition is key goal in the early stages of any company, so by launching itself into the public eye through high profile features in magazines, advertisements, and social media, it was able to disrupt the entire industry.

Sounds like a big win for MoviePass, right? Well, as MoviePass has become more talked-about, its frequent changes and bold promises have hurt its consumer perception.

In the past few months, MoviePass’ reputation has been increasingly volatile, as a slew of new policies have angered its customer base. For the last several months, the company has seemed to announce changes to its business model every week.

MoviePass has had a few marketing wins, though -- with moves like a reintroduction to unlimited movies -- but short-lived policy changes create short-lived positive sentiment. Overall, consumer sentiment has been on the decline, with an all-time low of only 25% favorability.

In several instances, MoviePass has been able to recover the brand’s positive sentiment, but its approach has also proven problematic. Often, the company will respond to negative sentiment by announcing new policy changes. However, just as quickly, sentiment has dropped again as consumers lose faith in these promises.

Also, when looking major news and entertainment publications since August 2017, many reports focus on skepticism about MoviePass’s business model, noting that it couldn’t possibly be profitable. And it’s true, MoviePass burns over $20 million in cash a month, given that if a customer in a major city goes to one movie per month, the company is already in the red.

But a change in subscription costs only adds to the perception that MoviePass doesn’t understand its target audience, and that further leads to the skepticism of its business model. One of the best ways to counteract that would be to find consistency. In a perfect world, it would go back to what people got excited about in the first place, which would be the movie-a-day plan, but at this point, any consistency would be helpful.

As MoviePass tries to reinvent the wheel, the best solution is to listen to its customers and bring back what they were initially excited about: unlimited movies. The unlimited promise that hasn’t been its model for some time still remains a main topic, amid talk of people canceling their subscription and poor customer service.

With all these recent changes, many fear MoviePass is in turmoil and  may not last long enough to see its industry innovation come to fruition.

The MoviePass model may still be the future. Demand is certainly high, and the increasingly pricey industry has been in need of a shakeup for a long time coming. The only existing question is whether or not it will be the company that finds success, or whether it will meet its point of no return while another player steps up.